HBO's Game of Thrones Season 7 Premiere Date Reveal Misfired & Twitter Had a Field Day

Best laid plans, right, HBO?

On Thursday, the cable network sent out a press release that the premiere date for the highly-anticipated seventh season of Game of Thrones would be revealed during a special live broadcast on the show’s Facebook page. Once it began, fans learned that the information they’d come for was hidden inside the massive block of ice you see in the photo above. To melt it, they needed to type “FIRE” into the comments. To say that things didn’t go smoothly would be an understatement.

After two pauses in the live feed (to brainstorm how the hell they’d get this ice to melt faster?), it wasn’t until a full hour had passed—longer than the run time of a typical episode of GoT, mind you—that the folks running the show finally just let the fire blast the ice uninterrupted. The premiere date was revealed a full nine minutes later—July 16, 2017, if you didn’t breathlessly watch like the rest of us—followed by a brief teaser teasing the only war that matters that’s coming for everyone. You know, the one with the White Walkers.

For those who dedicated over an hour of their life to quite literally watch ice melt, the event came off as a bit of, well, a flop. Naturally, Twitter had a field day with HBO’s odd bit of audience trolling. Here are a few of our favorite reactions.

What did you think about HBO’s ice block stunt? Sound off in the comments below!

Game of Thrones returns Sunday, July 16 on HBO.