"Game of Thrones" season 8 premiere was pirated 55 million times during its first 24 hours. It's a very big number. A lot of people pirated the show, despite it having massive ratings that broke HBO records, Forbes reports.

Still, the Season 7 premiere was pirated 90 million times in its first three days. But this is still a faster rate, and three times the number of legal viewings which clocked in at 17.4 million.

The biggest offenders are India, with 9.5 million instances, China with 5.2 million instances and the US with 4 million.

Of these three, Indian viewers have the best excuse: HBO is not available in India, and there is no legal means of watching Season 8 at this time. In China, the version aired was a censored version that cut out all the naughty bits, giving Chinese viewers (already fairly accustomed to piracy) a good enough reason to pirate the premiere.