True Detective finale cripples HBO Go — Internet freaks out

The biggest surprise of the True Detective finale? HBO’s streaming service wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming demand.

Fans of HBO’s masterful detective series tonight were confronted with something worse than the horrific deeds of The Yellow King when they tried to stream the show on HBO Go: They received an error message.

Every streaming service certainly has issues with occasional outages, but I’ve yet to see such a widespread issue from HBO Go. The error messages didn’t affect every HBO Go user, and the problem didn’t seem to prevent streams of other content, but a quick Twitter search reveals plenty of complaints.

HBO was quick to respond with a tweeted statement:

Due to overwhelmingly popular demand for #TrueDetective, we've been made aware of an issue affecting some users. Please try again soon.

— HBO GO Help (@HBOGOhelp) March 10, 2014

Many of the complaints appeared to come from West Coast viewers who were trying to stream the episode on HBO Go before it officially aired live in their timezone, while others likely included viewers who don’t even pay for HBO.

HBO Go is about to become a trending topic for all the wrong reasons. #WhereCarcosaAt

— N’Gai Croal (@ncroal) March 10, 2014

https://twitter.com/davechensky/status/442858105760514048

Plot twist: the spinning hbo go wheel *is* the true detective finale. Time is a flat circle..

— Prashant Deva (@pdeva) March 10, 2014

HBO CEO Richard Plepler said earlier this year that the network doesn’t mind if people share their HBO Go logins. But after a meltdown like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company tried to be more restrictive in the future.