Yahoo News House of the Dragon Series Premiere Crashes HBO Max Application on Amazon Devices
Ollie Upton/HBO Max
Some House of the Dragon fans felt a return to the highest levels of Game of Thrones' popularity when the HBO Max application crashed for some as they tried to view the prequel's premiere.
On Sunday, the website DownDetector.com reported some 3,690 HBO Max outages just after 9 p.m. ET, when "The Heirs of the Dragon" series premiere premiered on HBO and became available to stream on HBO Max.
Some HBO subscribers wrote on Twitter that they could not watch the new series — the first television content set in the Game of Thrones universe since the original series ended in 2019 — on Sunday and attributed the problem to the likely significant amount of viewers using HBO Max at once to view the episode, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
RELATED: House of the Dragon: Back to the World of Westeros and the Battle for the Crown
However, a spokesperson for HBO said that most users who experienced problems Sunday appeared to be using Amazon devices to stream the show.
"House of the Dragon is being successfully viewed by millions of HBO Max subscribers this evening," HBO told PEOPLE in a statement Monday. "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."
Courtesy HBO
More than a dozen users who responded to HBO Max's Twitter post at 9 p.m. ET Sunday and indicated that the app had crashed said they were using an Amazon Fire TV device. One user indicated that the HBO Max app was still crashing on Fire TV in a response roughly three hours after the episode premiered.
Sunday was not the first time Game of Thrones content led to an HBO crash — in July 2017, the network's website and the now-defunct HBO Now streaming service experienced problems for many viewers upon Game of Thrones' season seven premiere, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
House of the Dragon's issues loading on Amazon Fire devices come ahead of Amazon Video's own Sept. 2 of premiere The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a fantasy prequel set well before The Lord of the Rings franchise's most popular story in its own right — and Amazon Video's most expensive project ever.
Photograph by Ollie Upton/HBO
RELATED: House of the Dragon Reviews Arrive, What Critics Are Saying About the 'Game of Thrones' Prequel
As critics started unveiling their reviews on House of the Dragon, opinions of the fantasy epic are mostly positive, but not every element of the show is garnering praise.
THR's Daniel Fienberg wrote,"HBO has ended up with a show that feels reverse-engineered to give devoted Game of Thrones fans a facsimile of what they liked about the original series, while casual Game of Thrones fans get … ummm … lots and lots of dragons. I mean, it's right there in the title, House of the Dragon, which I can only assume supplanted the original Game of Thrones: Oops, All Targaryens!"
In summarizing the plot, Fienberg wrote, "House of the Dragon is primarily the story of two young women — Rhaenyra (not to be confused with Rhaenys) and Alicent — navigating paths to power in a male-dominated world, being raised by fathers who don't have a clue how to raise them, while Matt Smith rides dragons and chews scenery."
The Los Angeles Times review was more positive, and said, "While honoring the legacy and look of the original series, the spinoff wisely adopts subtle changes in tone and approach while introducing a fresh world of characters and storylines."
Critic Lorraine Ali particularly enjoyed the first episode. "The exchange between mother and daughter, and the artful contrast of dueling knights and dutiful midwives, are powerful enough on their own to render the first episode a smashing success and show that House of the Dragon has a depth of understanding of its female characters that GoT took years to find."
The Verge was largely underwhelmed by the available six episodes that critics viewed in advance of the release, particularly calling out its treatment of race.
"In contrast to the Targaryen family, whose members House of the Dragon does a better job of fleshing out as people just by giving them more screen time, most of the show's prominent characters of color — the Velaryons especially — are background players presented like an overdue apologia for Game of Thrones' overwhelming whiteness," Charles Pulliam-Moore wrote.
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House of the Dragon airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
