Crunchyroll Fumbles My Hero Academia Season 8 Premiere Weekend: Hours-Long Delay and Missing Subtitles
What should have been a victory lap for Crunchyroll turned into a meltdown as My Hero Academia’s release day sparked sitewide outages, login errors, and long delays, leaving paying fans fuming. As the simulcast stumbled, complaints flooded social feeds and support queues, overshadowing one of anime’s biggest premieres.
My Hero Academia tried to kick off its final season with a bang. Instead, Crunchyroll tripped over the start line in the middle of the night.
What happened
The season 8 premiere was listed for an early drop — 2:30 AM Pacific / 5:30 AM Eastern — but the episode didn't actually show up on Crunchyroll for a lot of people until roughly 10 hours later. The odd part: it hit Prime Video's Crunchyroll channel at the correct time. So if you were up late and checking the main app, you probably thought you were losing it. You weren't.
Subtitles made it messier
When the episode finally did arrive, some viewers got the Japanese audio without English subtitles. Those subs rolled in later, but not before folks started calling the whole thing, well, embarrassing.
The ongoing subtitle headache
This isn't happening in a vacuum. Crunchyroll has already taken heat this year for its new subtitle typeface, and there was a much-memed German subtitle snafu that randomly name-dropped ChatGPT. And while we're here, the company's top brass has been trying to draw a line on how it makes stuff:
"Crunchyroll is not considering AI in the creative process." — CEO Rahul Parini, via Forbes
Where MHA goes from here
Season 8 is the big finish and will wrap the main series in 12 episodes. The world isn't going away, though. The spinoff keeps the lights on: My Hero Academia: Vigilantes season 2 is slated for January 2026.
Peeking ahead to winter
- My Hero Academia: Vigilantes season 2 — January 2026
- Jujutsu Kaisen season 3 — January 2026
- Frieren: Beyond Journey's End season 2 — January 2026
- Fire Force season 3 (final episodes) — January 2026
So yes, the rollout was messy. But once the dust settles, we're in the home stretch for MHA, with a packed winter waiting just on the other side.