HBO Max was briefly unavailable for many users on Sunday evening — just when the “Euphoria” Season 2 finale was set to hit the streamer.
User reports of problems accessing HBO Max began to spike at 8:55 p.m. ET, according to service monitoring site DownDetector, with errors concentrated in the Northeast U.S. The final episode of HBO hit “Euphoria” S2, “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name,” was scheduled to go live at 9 p.m. ET.
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Error messages that users were shown included, “Can’t Connect. We’re having issues connecting to HBO Max right now. Please try again.”
On connected-TV devices, HBO Max showed the error message, “Something Went Wrong. Sorry, we’re having trouble communicating with the service. Please close the app and try again.” HBO Max’s mobile device was giving users an error message that their device was not connected to the internet.
“We’ve seen the tweets from some of our users who had trouble accessing HBO Max around 9 p.m. ET and are engaging directly to help get them back into the platform,” a WarnerMedia rep wrote in an email statement. “This short interruption has since been resolved.”
Access to HBO Max appeared to be restored within half an hour of the initial problems. Complaints on DownDetector spiked to more than 52,000 as of 9:05 p.m. ET, but had slowed down to under 4,000 by 9:20 p.m.
It’s not the first time HBO Max has had trouble handling traffic for a high-demand event. In May 2021, the service was down for about a half hour when the finale of “Mare of Easttown,” the critically acclaimed limited-series crime drama starring Kate Winslet, was set to premiere.
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