Foxtel has explained why the Foxtel Now service buckled under the weight of Game of Thrones viewers flocking to the service to watch the highly-anticipated first episode of Season 7.
The late rush of customers subscribing to Foxtel Now and others upgrading to the Drama Pack is what brought the system to its knees.
Foxtel has unreservedly apologised to the customers affected by the outage but it has not publicly offered any type of refund or compensation.
The Foxtel Identity Management System (IDM), which is used to verify a customer’s account before viewing content, could not handle the sheer number of requests.
The IDM can usually handle 5,000 processes a day but was faced with more than 70,000 in the space of a few hours.
Foxtel says subscriptions to Foxtel Now jumped by 40 per cent in the 48 hours before the screening of the new Game of Thrones episode on Monday.
The company says this is why customers were unable to log into their accounts with Foxtel Now and the Foxtel app.
Foxtel says it is unable to determine the exact number of customers affected.
In a statement, the company said they had anticipated heavy usage for the Game of Thrones premiere but the demand far exceeded their expectations.
Foxtel advises anybody thinking of signing up to the Foxtel Now service, should do so well before the next episode of Game of Thrones goes to air on Monday.
There were problems in the US, India and Latin America due to the extraordinary popularity of the program.
Foxtel Now was back up and running late on Monday night. To make up for customers missing last night’s screening of Game of Thrones, there will be multiple repeat screenings of the episode on the Showcase channel.
