Hotstar[1] suffered a technical issue early on Monday morning, as Game of Thrones[2] fans landed in undead-horde sized numbers hoping to catch the return of their favourite show. While everyone was expecting to catch episode 1 of season 7[3] of Game of Thrones, many users – including a few at Gadgets 360 – were met with error messages that read: "We're having a temporary playback issue. We're working on it and will be back very soon!" or "Something unexpected has occurred. We're working on it. Please try again in sometime."
Naturally, people took to Twitter to vent out their frustration, asking the official account what had gone wrong. Hotstar admitted there was an issue, with a tweet[4] at 8:06am claiming "there was a small blip" post which normal service had been resumed. That corroborates with some of our experiences, as we were able to watch the episode at around 8:10am. We've reached out to Hotstar, and will update with a statement if we hear back.
For what it's worth, the glitch didn't affect everyone. The season 7 premiere went live on the service at 7:30am, and some – including this correspondent – were lucky enough to watch the full episode without a single issue. At this point, we've to surmise that the Old Gods and the New were keen to read our recap of the season 7 premiere[5].
If we're being serious, it's possible that Hotstar's servers were unable to cope with the demand. It's a problem streaming companies often run into, as they underestimate the traffic load. HBO itself has been on the receiving end of this in previous years, and it happened on Sunday night too, with the premiere momentarily ...