It's the equivalent of spraining your ankle during warmups for the big game: Lots of people are expecting something great from you, and you fail to deliver. Sunday night's Game of Thrones episode, "Battle of the Bastards," was one of the year's most highly anticipated, but when would-be viewers across the United States attempted to log on to HBO Go or HBO Now (the GoT network's streaming services), they were greeted with error messages.
It seems that, even though the show was competing with Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the traffic was enough to pose problems for HBO's infrastructure. If that's the case, HBO didn't score well on preparedness: The penultimate episode of each season is traditionally the one featuring the most impactful plot points, twists and visual spectacle. If there's one night of the year for all hands to be on deck at IT, this was it—HBO built up a specific expectation and didn't follow through.
How well did it score on responsiveness, though? To its credit, @HBOGOhelp responded to many queries, but nearly all of them were form responses initiating a troubleshooting process, as if unaware that a larger issue existed. One fed-up user tweeted, "Hey HBO, please stop pretending this is an individual user problem and find a solution for the masses!" There still has been no official statement.
A couple of lessons for communicators in the aftermath: First, when crisis is predictable, predict it. From time to time everyone gets hit by something out of the blue, but the most effective teams will be able to spot impending problems. Second, make sure teams are talking with each other; if a larger problem exists, the people who work in consumer-facing communications should know about it and have their messaging ready.
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