An upcoming episodes of HBO's hit series "Game of Thrones" recently surfaced online, but ironically it was leaked by none other than HBO itself.
HBO's Nordic arm that was responsible for posting the most recent episode of the show online, attributed the incident to "technical issue."
The network has toiled in the past to protect its blockbuster series from surfacing online prior to its scheduled Sunday night airing. But this is not the first time episodes of the series leaked online. In 2015, a disaster struck when first four episode of the series debuted online, even before the premier of the first one.
Reports indicated that fans illegitimately downloaded the pirated content from many torrent sites including the notorious file-sharing site, ThePirateBay and Kickass, Yibada reported.
HBO left no stone unturned to curb the illegal download of Game of Thrones' already-aired episodes. Surprisingly some uploads were reported to have disappeared from the torrent site within few minutes after posting. But that's not all, the popular channel even tried to censor spoilers that surface online and unveil the upcoming storylines along with other details of the series.
That said, it's quite shocking that 2016's biggest leak comes from HBO itself.
According to reports on TechTimes, the channel's Nordic arm posted the latest episode of the show a day early on its official website by mistake. However, pirates were quick to copy the leaked episode and then leak it online. Although the first copies of the leaked episodes were low quality, a 1080p version surfaced online in no time.
No prizes for guessing, thousands of pirated copies were downloaded as word spread indicating the leak had appeared on the channel's website.
According to HBO's spokesperson, Sunday's episode was made available earlier than its actual schedule on the HBO Nordic platform, as a result of a technical problem. Upon realizing the episode has leaked, the channel tried it's best to restrict further access to the episode.
