The premiere for House of Cards’ second season received rave reviews from fans and critics and ended in one of the most shocking TV deaths of all time, so the bar was set extremely high for the Netlix series’ third season premiere. While it wasn’t supposed to release on the streaming service until Feb. 27, a technical glitch allowed users to watch the first 10 episodes of the third season on Wednesday afternoon, building fresh hype for the show and allowing viewers to start weighing in on the highly-anticipated premiere more than two weeks early.

“Due to a technical glitch some Frank Underwood fans got a sneak peak,” Netflix representative Karen Barragan wrote on Thursday. “He’ll be back on Netflix on Feb. 27.”

The House of Cards official Twitter account made a joke about the glitch, tweeting, “This is Washington. There’s always a leak.” While fans who didn’t have any idea that new episodes were temporarily available for viewing are surely disappointed that they missed out, several people who started in on the first installment were able to stay on the stream long enough to watch the entirety of House of Cards season three’s first 10 episodes before they were taken down. Some critics think this leak may have been a publicity stunt to get people talking about the show after its occasionally boring second season, but the excitement of the accidental early release wasn’t enough to keep Yahoo! News writer Spencer Kornhaber from calling the premiere “gloomier, slower, and far less fun” than last season’s premiere. 

Season Three picks up where last season left off; the ever-climbing backroom dealer Frank Underwood is president, and is already “making a call on a drone strike against terrorists.”

“You have to be a little more human when you’re the president,” Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood states to the camera in an initial scene.

Underwood is being pulled at from all sides, and has to weigh competing demands from close friends and random powerful people with the stresses of governing a nation. However, the premiere is reportedly more focused on a secondary character’s solitary outside of the White House, which Kornhaber thinks implies that “a major theme of the third season will revolve around people trying to lead purpose-driven-lives and being thwarted.”