HBO GO Overwhelmed Again On Sunday Night

HBO Go, HBO’s TV Everywhere service, had another rough go of it Sunday as “overwhelming demand” driven by the premiere of season four of Game of Thrones took the service down temporarily.

“Looks like there’s trouble in the realm. Apologies for the inconvenience. We’ll be providing updates, so please stay tunes,” HBO Go said via Twitter amid viewer complaints that the service was crashing.

The service began to return to “several platforms” a couple of hours later, with HBO Go confirming later that night that the TV Everywhere service had been fully restored, but did not identify a root cause.

"HBO GO did experience issues due to overwhelming demand around the premiere of Game of Thrones. The service was fully restored on all platforms by midnight ET," an HBO spokeswoman said Monday.

The temporary outage was the second to occur in recent weeks. Last month, HBO Go suffered a similar problem during the live-streamed season one finale of True Detective.

HBO Go doesn’t typically have a huge impact on broadband networks. According to Sandvine’s latest Global Internet Phenomena Report, HBO’s TVE service accounted for just 0.67% of downstream traffic on fixed broadband networks in North America, versus the 31.6% that Netflix typically generates.