Even under normal circumstances, it’s not easy to avoid Game of Thrones spoilers. Details leak from the show’s production, actors divulge plot points in interviews, teasers and trailers offer revealing hints of what’s coming next. If you manage to make it to Sunday night with your ignorance intact, you had better watch the show promptly, lest someone give away major happenings on social media.
This season, that struggle has gotten even harder, with Thrones episodes leaking online after being stolen from HBO in a cyberattack. Now, the penultimate episode of Season 7 has found its way online, thanks to a mistake by a third-party vendor that resulted in the show being uploaded to HBO Nordic and HBO España. HBO provided this statement to Buzzfeed:
“We have learned that the upcoming episode of Game of Thrones was accidentally posted for a brief time on the HBO Nordic and HBO España platforms. The error appears to have originated with a third party vendor and the episode was removed as soon as it was recognized. This is not connected to the recent cyber incident at HBO in the U.S.”
HBO removed the show within an hour of its accidental posting, but this is the internet where everything is forever. Naturally, the full episode made its way to torrent sites and the Freefolk reddit. Now, if you look around hard enough, you can watch a (possibly shaky) version of Sunday’s episode right now. And even if you don’t look around that hard, you very well might stumble across a spoiler.
