MUMBAI: Four people have been arrested in India for leaking an episode from HBO’s “Game of Thrones” television series before it was aired in the country, police said Monday.
Already the most pirated show in TV history, the popular fantasy drama — which tells the story of noble families vying for the Iron Throne — has been plagued by leaks in recent weeks following the premiere of the seventh season.
After receiving a complaint for a company “we investigated the case and have arrested four individuals for unauthorized publication of the fourth episode from season seven,” Deputy Commissioner of Police Akbar Pathan told AFP.
He said the four — accused of criminal breach of trust and computer-related offenses — would be detained until August 21 amid an investigation.
The case was filed by a Mumbai-based company responsible for storing and processing the TV episodes for an app, local media said.
The four arrested were company employees who possessed official credentials giving them access to the episodes, the reports added.
Game of Thrones has more Emmy Awards than any narrative show in history and airs in 170 countries, with viewership figures shattering records across the world.
As well as being a hit globally, it has a massive fan base in South Asia.
Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss last year announced the shortened run of seven and six episodes for the final two seasons and confirmed the summer return for season seven, a departure from the usual April premieres.
The show has been teasing winter’s arrival since its pilot episode in 2011, and in the latest episode preview “Death Is The Enemy” has finally moved closer to showcasing a battle between a horde of undead “White Walkers” from the frozen North and a troop of warriors led by hero Jon Snow (Kit Harington).
Four arrested in India for leaking ‘Game of Thrones’ episode
Four arrested in India for leaking ‘Game of Thrones’ episode
Amazon’s AWS reports outage after UAE datacenter struck by ‘objects’
- AWS confirmed sparks and fire after objects hit UAE data center causing disruptions to Emirate and Bahrain regions
- Full recovery expected to “be many hours away”
LONDON: Amazon’s cloud-computing facilities in the Middle East faced power and connectivity issues on Monday after unidentified “objects” struck its data center in the United Arab Emirates.
The objects had triggered a fire on Sunday that forced authorities to eventually cut power to two clusters of Amazon data centers in the UAE, with restoration expected to take several more hours, according to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) status page.
Localized power issues impacted AWS services in both the UAE and neighboring Bahrain, according to the page. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident.
While Amazon did not identify the objects, the incident happened on the same day Iran fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf States in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A strike, if confirmed, on the AWS facility in the UAE will mark the first time a major US tech company’s data center has been knocked offline by military action. It could also raise questions around Big Tech’s pace of expansion in the region.
US tech giants have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft said in November it plans to bring its total investment in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips for its data centers there.
“In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints,” Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
Microsoft as well as Google and Oracle — both of which also operate facilities in the UAE — did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
AWS said a full recovery from the issues was expected to “be many hours away” for both UAE and Bahrain.
The outage had disrupted a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.
