Foxtel elaborates on Game of Thrones glitch
Following last night’s collapse of Foxtel streaming services as subscribers surged to watch Game of Thrones, the company has issued another apology and elaborated on the cause of the glitch.
According to Foxtel, the cause of the problems lay with the company’s Identity Management System (IDM) being hit with 70,000 transactions in just a few hours, instead of its normal daily load of around 5,000.
Due to the problems, Foxtel has rescheduled the episode to screen tonight at 9.15pm, on Wednesday at 1.20pm, Thursday at 10.10pm, Friday at 11.25am and Saturday at 8.30pm, along with showings on the Showcase Channel. The program is also available on demand.
The company’s updated statement was issued this afternoon:
Game of Thrones on Foxtel
Game of Thrones is a global television phenomenon and the launch of Season 7 was the most anticipated television event of the year.
The number of Australians subscribing to Foxtel’s streaming service, Foxtel Now leapt by 40% in the 48 hours prior to last night’s screening of episode one. We expect a record audience of 1.5 million Australians to watch this episode via an iQ box, Foxtel Now or the Foxtel app.
The combination of new Foxtel now customers signing up and existing customers upgrading to get the Drama Pack so they could watch the show, put unprecedented pressure on our technical operations. Foxtel’s Identity Management System (IDM), which verifies customers’ entitlement to view content, which usually handles around 5,000 processes a day was hit with 70,000 transactions in just a few hours.
Unfortunately, due to this massive surge in demand, a significant number of customers experienced difficulty logging in to Foxtel Now and the Foxtel App. The system was unable to verify some customers’ entitlements. We are unable to say exactly how many customers were affected because the system is unable to separately identify customers who have a problem logging in but later successfully manage to do so.
We had anticipated heavy usage for last night’s premiere; however, the traffic that eventuated far exceeded expectations. Foxtel’s engineers are examining what steps can be taken to mitigate any recurrence.
Given that the problems were driven by the volumes of people who sought to sign up on the day of broadcast, Foxtel advises others who wish to sign up before next week’s episode to do so a few days in advance.
We note that problems were experienced in the USA, India and Latin America, also driven by the extraordinary surge in demand for the program.
The system is now working and customers are able to watch the episode either on demand or at an encore screening. Encores are scheduled for today Tuesday, at Midday, and 9.15pm, on Wednesday at 1.20pm, Thursday at 10.10pm, Friday at 11.25am and Saturday at 8.30pm. Foxtel will also add multiple repeat screenings of the episode on the showcase channel.
Foxtel unreservedly apologises to customers who were affected by this issue.
We truly appreciate our customers’ patience during last night’s outage and will do everything possible to ensure that this does not occur again.
Ends
The on demand service that you need to sign up for a couple of days before you need it.
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Game of Thrones was popular and they didn’t cater for demand….are they really that stupid?
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So that deflection attempting to say HBO also had problems was exactly what it smelt like? Bullshit.
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Australia’s most hated Brand?
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On the plus side, Foxtel will never have this kind of “unprecedented demand” again, because people are just going to go back to pirating Game Of Thrones via torrents – ironically a system which benefits from having more and more users…
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Definitely
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Ahhh Foxtel.
They had one chance to get this right and they totally screwed it! For at least the two years they’ve been pushing against piracy and talking about delivering more user friendly services – yet their systems and service is rubbish, and their brand relaunch was stolen from another company.
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Wow, it’s screening again tonight, eh?
As if all those disgruntled people haven’t downloaded it illegally by now. The popularity of GOT is nothing new. What were they expecting? Such a huge inexcusable fail.
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