If you don't watch Game of Thrones or just didn't get a chance to watch the Season 5 finale yet, I'm sorry. This must be a hard day for you since you practically can't go anywhere on the Internet without seeing the buzz about all of the shocking moments that went down during Sunday night's episode on HBO.
That's why it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Season 5 finale of Game of Thrones already shattered some piracy records. Pirated copies of the show appeared online shortly after the finale aired on HBO Sunday night, and the episode was downloaded 1.5 million times in its first eight hours online, according to data collected by TorrentFreak. With that, the Season 5 finale of Game of Thrones has set a new piracy record.
"Never before have we seen this many downloads in such a short period of time, and last year it took half a day to reach the same number," according to TorrentFreak, which also estimates that Game of Thrones will be downloaded more than 10 million times in the days to come.
The Season 5 finale of Game of Thrones also set a new record for the number of users sharing a single torrent at the same time with 258,131, breaking the previous record, which was achieved by the show's Season 4 finale with a peak of 254,114 active sharers at one time.
Game of Thrones is consistently one of the most pirated TV shows of the year. In fact, the show even came under some controversy earlier this year when the first four episodes leaked online just as Season 5 was about to begin. That prompted HBO to crack down on pirates, although this record-breaking number of downloads seems to suggest that those efforts haven't really been working.
[H/T UPROXX]
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