Raise your hand if you’re a victim of the HBO Max crashing during the “House of the Dragon” premiere.
On Sunday night, more than 3,400 viewers tuning in for the premiere of the “Game of Thrones” prequel series reported experiencing an outage on the streaming platform, according to DownDetector.com. Many also tweeted their complaints to HBO Max while the app was down.
Instead of offering a generic response about working to resolve the issue or technical difficulties, the streaming platform’s support team at @HBOMaxHelp tweeted out a hack to help disgruntled “Game of Thrones” fans overcome the problem and start watching the spinoff.
“Hi , to help with the crashing issues you’re experiencing, please go to any other show/movie on HBO Max, turn off subtitles/captions, and then try streaming House of the Dragon again,” read a message from the app’s IT squad. “Let us know if that helps!”
When Twitter user @Gworship9 pointed out that turning off captions would not be beneficial to “those of us who are hearing impaired,” the support team replied, “You should be able to turn those captions back on after completing those steps and allowing the captions to stay off for a few minutes.”
Meanwhile, Twitter user @cattybish shared another fix that appeared to work for some people: “To everyone having problems with hbo max app crashing – if you have a fire tv and use the hbo max app if you create a new profile it will let you watch House Of the Dragon without crashing.”
After neither of those tricks panned out for @CelenaMSpears, the Twitter user discovered yet another way to dodge the outage: “FINALLY, When I changed the audio from ‘best available,’ it worked!
According to DownDetector, most reported experiencing technical difficulties Sunday evening around 6 p.m., when the pilot episode of “House of the Dragon” debuted on the West Coast. But several HBO Max subscribers were still tweeting about the crash come Monday morning.
”.@hbomax has now crashed three times while trying to watch House of the Dragon,” tweeted @dakthreign Monday at 6:57 a.m. “Seriously, you have to intentionally hire people this incompetent for this to happen on a freaking ROKU.”
“Your app shuts down every time I try to play [‘House of the Dragon’],” tweeted @StandTheStorm at 8:03 a.m. “Everything else plays but not HOTD.”
In a statement provided Monday morning to the Los Angeles Times, HBO Max said, “House of the Dragon was successfully viewed by millions of HBO Max subscribers last night. A small portion of users attempting to connect via Fire TV devices had issues and we worked directly with impacted users to get them into the platform.”
Created by Ryan J. Condal and “A Song of Ice and Fire” author George R.R. Martin, “House of the Dragon” centers on key figures of the Targaryen dynasty 172 years before Queen Daenerys Targaryen of “Game of Thrones” fame was born.
New episodes of the period drama — starring Paddy Considine, Matt Smith, Milly Alcock, Emma D’Arcy, Eve Best, Rhys Ifans, Emily Carey, Olivia Cooke and Steve Toussaint — premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.