The unaired sixth episode of the seventh season of HBO’s fantasy drama Game of Thrones has been leaked online, not by hackers, it was the network itself.
The episode, Death is the Enemy, was accidentally aired by HBO Nordic in Spain for an hour before it was removed. That was enough time for the episode to make its way to both file-sharing sites and Reddit where it has since spread fast.
An HBO spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Verge that the cable company had accidentally prematurely released this week’s episode on its own platforms:
“We have learned that the upcoming episode of Game of Thrones was accidentally posted for a brief time on the HBO Nordic and HBO Espana 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 US.”
A sixth season episode was also released early by an HBO subsidiary last year, and the show remains the most pirated TV series in the world.
