For anyone who watches Euphoria or spends time on social media Sunday nights, it’s not remotely surprising to hear that the Season 2 finale broke HBO Max. Variety reports, just as the episode titled “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name” was set to go live at 9 p.m. ET, the app began having trouble at 8:55 p.m. ET. Seems like plenty of viewers have been here before with HBO Max and tried to get in early.
Planning ahead didn’t help, as users saw error messages like “Can’t Connect. We’re having issues connecting to HBO Max right now. Please try again” and “Something Went Wrong. Sorry, we’re having trouble communicating with the service. Please close the app and try again.”
In response, WarnerMedia released an email statement that read: “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. This short interruption has since been resolved.”
Website DownDetector began seeing reports of outages from the Northeast U.S. at 8:55 p.m. ET, with a spike coming at 9:05 p.m. ET. However, HBO must have fixed things quickly, as complaints slowed down by 9:20 p.m. ET.
Here’s the thing, this isn’t the first time HBO Max has had these issues with Euphoria. As we previously reported at The Root, the Season 2 premiere also saw the app crash. This makes the same mistake during the finale even more ridiculous because WarnerMedia could have easily seen this coming.
Euphoria has made waves throughout Season 2, with the anti-drug group D.A.R.E. complaining about the drug use of the teen characters and Emmy-winning star Zendaya responding to the criticism stating, “Our show is in no way a moral tale to teach people how to live their life or what they should be doing,” she said. “If anything, the feeling behind Euphoria, or whatever we have always been trying to do with it, is to hopefully help people feel a little bit less alone in their experience and their pain. And maybe feel like they’re not the only one going through or dealing with what they’re dealing with.”
It’s hard to think that anyone is watching the characters’ behavior and thinking it’s a healthy pattern to copy. No matter how you feel about Euphoria, it remains one of HBO’s biggest hits and has already been renewed for Season 3. In the meantime, Euphoria Seasons 1 and 2 are available on HBO Max…barring any unexpected crashes.