HBO has given a three-season renewal to its Emmy Award-winning, late-night talk show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. 

According to network officials, the deal will keep the series, currently in its 10th season, on the air through its 13th season in 2026. The New York-based series features Oliver's take on the pressing political, social and cultural issues of the day. 

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver has earned 26 Emmy Awards since its premiere in 2014, and is nominated for four 2023 Emmy Awards. 

The series is executive produced by Oliver, Tim Carvell, Liz Stanton, Jon Thoday, and James Taylor.  

“Over the past decade, John and his exceptional team have combined deep research and intelligence with cutting humor to tackle a broad range of subjects, both widely discussed and unconventional,” HBO and Max Content chairman and CEO Casey Bloys said. “With an important election year on the horizon, we look forward to seeing what John has in store for audiences over the next three years.” 

Late-night hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver have teamed up on a podcast called “Strike Force Five,” which debuts on Spotify August 30. All proceeds from the podcast go to staffers of the late-night shows, who are not working due to the writers’ strike. 

Spotify says, “Strike Force Five welcomes you to a conversation between five rival colleagues for an inside look at late-night television.” It describes how the five hosts decided in the spring to meet weekly, via Zoom, and discuss the Hollywood strikes and what they mean for late-night TV. “What ensued was a series of hilarious and compelling conversations,” Spotify said. 

The series will run for at least 12 episodes, with each host serving in the revolving moderator role. 

Colbert hosts The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS. Fallon hosts The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on NBC. Kimmel hosts Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC and Seth Meyers hosts Late Night with Seth Meyers on NBC. Oliver hosts Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. 

Podcast sponsors are Mint Mobile and Diageo (Aviation American Gin, Bulleit Frontier Whiskey, Casamigos and Ketel One Vodka). 

“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to watch a football team with five quarterbacks on the field at once?” Spotify wondered. “Introducing Strike Force Five!”

A large portion of the public comments filed in the Federal Communications Commission’s network-neutrality docket came from “fake” email domains created by email generator programs, according to the National Legal and Policy Center, which said it has accumulated six CSV files with 1.5 million examples.

The NLPC said its analysis shows that between July 17 and Aug. 4, 5.8 million such “fake” comments were posted in the FCC docket, which had 18.5 million total comments at press time.

The group said the false domains came from a U.S. email generator program at fakemailgenerator.com and include armyspy.com, cuvox.de, dayrep.com, einrot.com, fleckens.hu, gustr.com, jourrapide.com, rhyta.com, superrito.com and teleworm.us.

The net-neutrality docket has been almost as controversial as FCC chair Ajit Pai’s proposal to roll back Title II regulations and review the 2015 Open Internet order’s rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization.

The FCC has said the comments system suffered a distributed-denial-of-service attack connected with John Oliver’s May 7 call on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, for viewers to flood it with comments in support of Title II. Net-neutrality activists have challenged the FCC’s claim, and Hill Democrats have said it needs investigating.

The FCC is also facing lawsuits for not providing more information on the alleged DDoS attacks, which were cited by its CIO, David Bray, in a May 8 statement following the airing.

“Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks,” Bray said. “These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host.”

Just last week, website Gizmodo posted a story questioning the DDoS claims and citing a former FCC security official saying there had been no DDoS attack in 2014, when Oliver made a similar on-air all for Title II and the FCC similarly cited an attack.

Gizmodo has previously said the FCC, in response to an FOIA request, conceded it did not have analysis to support the May assertion of a DDoS attack, though Pai spokesman Brian Hart has said that report was “categorically false.”

Pai has said the FCC will err on the side of transparency, taking the bogus with the bona fide. In either case, the deadline for comments is Aug. 30. The FCC will continue to accept comments past that date, but does not have to factor them into its decision.

A pair of Democratic senators has asked FCC chair Ajit Pai for more information on what the FCC has said were multiple DDoS attacks on its website that affected comments being posted there.

Related: FCC CIO Says Agency Hit by DDoS Attack

FCC chief information officer David Bray said the attacks "made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC."

The key docket in terms of activity that could have been interrupted is net neutrality, where the FCC still managed to post more than a half a million comments since last week, attack or no. Among the senators' questions was whether any comments were prevented from being submitted and, if so, how many.

Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the latter ranking member of the Senate Communications Subcommittee, sent a letter to Pai about the May 8 attack (which came in the wee hours of the morning following the May 7 airing of John Oliver's call, during HBO's Last Week Tonight, for a flood of comments in support of net neutrality.

Related: John Oliver Takes On Pai, Net Neutrality, Take II

They asked about the FCC's defenses against such an attack should it be repeated and wanted Pai to ensure the FCC provides other ways to comment as a workaround, such as a dedicated e-mail account.

“Any potentially hostile cyber activities that prevents Americans from being able to participate in a fair and transparent process must be treated as a serious issue,” the senators said.

Specifically, they requested the following information by June 8:

1. “Please provide details as to the nature of the DDoS attacks, including when the attacks began, when they ended, the amount of malicious traffic your network received, and an estimate of the number of devices that were sending malicious traffic to the FCC. To the extent that the FCC already has evidence suggesting which actor(s) may have been responsible for the attacks, please provide that in your response.
2. “Has the FCC sought assistance from other federal agencies in investigating and responding to these attacks? Which agencies have you sought assistance from? Have you received all of the help you have requested?
3. “Several federal agencies utilize commercial services to protect their websites from DDoS attacks. Does the FCC use a commercial DDoS protection service? If not, why not? To the extent that the FCC utilizes commercial DDoS protection products, did these work as expected? If not, why not?
4. “How many concurrent visitors is the FCC’s website designed to be able to handle? Has the FCC performed stress testing of its own website to ensure that it can cope as intended? Has the FCC identified which elements of its website are performance bottlenecks that limit the number of maximum concurrent visitors? Has the FCC sought to mitigate these bottlenecks? If not, why not?
5. “Did the DDoS attacks prevent the public from being able to submit comments through the FCC’s website? If so, do you have an estimate of how many individuals were unable to access the FCC website or submit comments during the attacks? Were any comments lost or otherwise affected?
6. “Will commenters who successfully submitted a comment — but did not receive a response, as your press release indicates — receive a response once your staff have addressed the DDoS and related technical issues?

While the letter did not question whether such an attack had happened, others have, including activist group Fight for the Future. 

"We think it's more than just coincidence that the FCC would cite a DDoS attack at the same time that John Oliver's call to make public comment on the FCC website in favor of net neutrality went viral," said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color Of Change, a big Title II fan. "That said, we certainly hope to see a full investigation into what happened in order to ensure the integrity and full transparency of a key federal agency. But the unfortunate reality is that, after everything this administration has done to steal our rights as Americans, we wouldn't be surprised if this was merely an attempt to label the democratic exercise of free speech as a cyberattack.”

Net-neutrality activist group Fight for the Future says it is "extremely skeptical" about the FCC's claims of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack Sunday night (May 7).

Related: FCC CIO Says Agency Hit by DDoS Attack

The FCC said the attack happened at midnight, which would be just after comedian John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment calling on viewers to flood the FCC with comments calling for retaining the Title II classification for ISPs that FCC chair Ajit Pai wants to reverse.

Fight for the Future is calling on the FCC to release logs on the attack to an independent third party -- a security researcher or media outlet -- to independently verify the attack.

"The agency has a responsibility to maintain a functioning website to receive large numbers of comments and feedback from the public," said Evan Greer campaign director for Fight for the Future. "They can't blame DDoS attacks without proof, they need to fix this problem and ensure that comments on this important issue are not lost."

Fight for the Future said that the FCC is reportedly suggesting that the same thing happened in 2014 after Oliver took aim at then FCC chair Tom Wheeler, likening him to a dingo babysitter, which it points out was not widely reported at the time -- instead the reports were that the site had crashed from the weight of comments from Oliver-inspired net-neutrality supporters -- and makes them even more suspect of the current claim.

FCC spokespeople were not available for comment at press time.

Amidst reports that John Oliver's segment on Title II in Sunday night's Last Week Tonight on HBO had created a flood of comments that brought down the FCC's comment site, the FCC released a statement saying it had been hit by a denial-of-service attack.

The statement came from Chief Information Officer Dr. David Bray about delays experienced by "consumers" trying to file comments. He did not specify the net neutrality docket.

“Beginning on Sunday night at midnight [Last week Tonight aired at 11 p.m.], our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host."

He said the attacks were not attempts to file comments themselves, but "rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward.” 

As expected, John Oliver took on net neutrality in Last Week Tonight Sunday night, as he did three years ago—Oliver pointed out in taking on the topic once again on the May 7 edition of his HBO show, mocking the new chairman as he did the last one and calling on internet trolls and nerds to flood the FCC with comments.

Oliver mercilessly mocked new chairman Ajit Pai, including picturing him menacingly with a weed whacker, a reference to a speech where Pai said he would be using the tool to weed out unneeded regs, and with a favorite oversized Reese's mug. Oliver said Pai's down-to-earth nerdiness—which he suggested was an affectation—was what made him dangerous, including Pai's fondness for cultural references, like quotes from The Big Lebowski.

Last time around Oliver's take was on then chairman Tom Wheeler as a dingo babysitter (he was riffing on the fact that Wheeler both was not signaling a move to Title II reclassification—which ISPs had called the "nuclear" option—and was a former lobbyist for cable and cell phone companies as head of their trade associations).

RELATED:Pai—FCC Will Encourage Innovations Like Free Data Plans

Also last time around, Oliver helped drive millions of complaints to the FCC. He said a repeat of that flood was necessary again. At press time midday Monday, the FCC's most-active dockets page, where the two net neutrality dockets occupied the top two spots, was unavailable , with various reports that Oliver's piece had succeeded in crashing the system.

Oliver said the process to complain was complicated so, as a public service, the show had bought the URL "gofccyourself.com" and viewers could go straight there to file a complaint that would then go to the FCC. "Tell Ajit Pai that you specifically support strong net neutrality backed by Title II oversight of ISPs," he said. "Every subculture must join as one...once more unto the breach my friends."

This time around, Oliver likened the plans by Pai to rollback Title II reclassification as part of the wider Trump Administration reg rollback, which he likened to Trump trying to kill every turkey Obama had pardoned (as part of a traditional Thanksgiving Day clemency photo op). He also mocked Pai's large coffee mug.

He said net neutrality is in trouble once again but is more than just about slowing traffic, but about not allowing Charter or Comcast or Cox or Verizon or AT&T to "limit or manipulate the choices you make online."

Oliver mocked Verizon's YouTube video last week explaining that the FCC is not going to kill net neutrality rules and walked viewers through Verizon's challenge to the old net neutrality rules. Oliver likened trusting ISPs with the Internet was like letting O.J. Simpson hold your samurai swords. He also pointed out, as Title II fans have been lately, that Pai was a former lawyer for Verizon.

Oliver also used an ISP discussion with investors to suggest claims that Title II reclassification would depress investment were not all they were cracked up to be.

Public Knowledge, one of the groups pushing back on Pai's plan, was pleased with Oliver's call to the Internet's flying "Reese's monkeys, as it were, to fly once again.

“It's time for the public to weigh in and tell Chairman Pai, Congress and the White House to keep their hands off the open internet," said VP Chris Lewis. "Once again, John Oliver nails it on the importance of strong open internet rules for our democracy and to prevent broadband price gouging," said . "His wit revealed the hypocrisy of FCC Chairman Pai's effort to pad the pockets of cable and broadband monopolies by dismantling essential protections against internet discrimination."

FIFA president Sepp Blatter, whose June 2 resignation caused HBO’s Last Week Tonight host John Oliver to chug a Bud Light Lime on air in fulfillment of a promise, has apparently gone back on his word. According to Swiss newspaper Blick, Blatter hinted that he could run for the FIFA presidency in December.

“Only those who know the past can understand the present and shape the future,” Blatter said at a function at a new FIFA museum in Zurich, according to Blick. “I have not resigned, but made my mandate available at an extraordinary congress.”

That last part refers to Blatter’s comments on June 2 when he said he would “lay down my mandate at an extraordinary elective congress,” where he would no longer be a candidate. It has been expected that the new vote would occur sometime in December. 

FIFA is slated to meet on July 22 to determine the exact date of the election. According to CNN, a FIFA spokesperson told the network that Blatter will not be among the candidates and that his comments only meant that he intended to remain FIFA president until the new elections.

Blatter has been at the center of a massive corruption scandal at the soccer body. After a series of raids by U.S. authorities in Switzerland, Blatter bowed to pressure and said he would step down as FIFA chief just days after he was re-elected to a fifth consecutive term. But the former FIFA chief has been known to go back on his word. According to CNN, he said after he was elected to his fourth term in 2011 that it would be his last. He ran again in 2015.   

Oliver, who has been an outspoken critic of FIFA and Blatter, had promised on air that he would drink a Bud Light (which he previously compared to a puddle underneath a dumpster at a Long John Silver fast food restaurant), take a bite out of every item on McDonald’s $1 Menu and wear a particularly outrageous line of Adidas sneakers (all FIFA sponsors) if they would play a role in Blatter’s ouster. While neither of the sponsors actually forced Blatter to resign, Oliver fulfilled his promise during the June 7 broadcast of the show.* to check*

Less than two weeks after the premiere of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver's sophomore season, HBO said it has ordered two more seasons of the satirical news series.

The renewal also comes just as Comedy Central has begun its search to replace The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, who last week announced he would be leaving the show by the end of the year.

HBO said Season 3 of Last Week Tonight will run in 2016, while season 4 will follow the next year; each will run 35 episodes. Season 2 debuted on Feb. 8.

The show's freshman season, which concluded last November and landed on numerous "Best of 2014" lists, won a Writers Guild Award on Saturday (Feb. 14) in the category of Comedy/Variety (Including Talk) – Series.

HBO will telecast a live concert to honor military veterans on Veteran’s Day (Nov. 11).

The inaugural Concert For Valor concert, hosted by HBO and coffee company Starbucks, will honor the courage and sacrifice of America’s veterans and their families, the network said. The concert, which will take place on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and will look to raise awareness for veterans service organizations, will feature performances from such stars as Eminem, Jamie Foxx, Dave Grohl, Metallica, John Oliver, Rihanna (pictured), Bruce Springsteen, Carrie Underwood and Zac Brown Band, as well as special appearances by Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.

HBO will open its feed to affiliates to allow non-HBO subscribers to view the special, said network officials.

“We are honored to play a small role to help raise awareness and support for our service men and women,” said  HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler in a statement. “Their immeasurable sacrifice deserves our nation’s gratitude. This event will not only celebrate their service, but help remind Americans of the many challenges they face on and off the battlefield. We are delighted to join with Starbucks in our mutual effort to pay tribute to our veterans and those currently serving in the military.”