HBO Max down: Streaming service breaks in middle of Mare of Easttown finale

Andrew Griffin
Monday 31 May 2021 03:39 BST
Comments
(© 2021 Home Box Office, Inc. Al)

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

HBO Max has broken in the middle of the Mare of Easttown finale.

The show was scheduled to be shown on the streaming service as well as traditional HBO channel at 10pm eastern time.

But as that time arrived, user found themselves unable to log on and shown error messages instead. That meant they were unable to watch the conclusion to the show, which has grown into a major hit and left viewers gripped.

Many speculated that the service was not able to cope with the vast number of people trying to watch the episode. HBO Max has been able to handle major episodes and event viewing in the past, however, such as the end of Game of Thrones.

Instead, they saw a message saying the episode was unable to load, with some being told that the service was unavailable and others asked to contact their TV provider. Others saw a message reading “content unavailable” and a long stream of letters.

But perhaps the strangest bug of all saw multiple users report that when they tried to watch Mare of Easttown, they were instead shown an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

The penultimate episode had included a number of clues and the promise that they would be resolved in its seventh, and final, installment.

HBO Max was yet to recognise the issues on its social feeds at the time of publication, and does not maintain an official status page. But tracking website DownDetector showed a huge number of errors reported as soon as the show aired, and users complained on Twitter, Reddit and other social networks.

The errors were reported both on the main HBO Max service as well as the legacy HBO Go and HBO Now ones.

The problems come just days after HBO Max celebrated its first birthday, and in the middle of a deal that will see parent company AT&T spin off it and its other streaming services to create a new company in collaboration with Discovery.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in