Tonight’s free On Demand from the Met is a 2008 production of La Bohème. The scene shown is Act II from the production of this season. Photo Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

Not surprisingly, an unprecedented surge of opera lovers across America tried to tune in to the Metropolitan Opera’s Free On Demand streaming of “Carmen” last night — only to experience difficulty. This morning, I contacted the Met to see what we need to do. The website is working now — but the best way to access On Demand is to download the app to your device.

Here is their statement:

Due to overwhelming, unprecedented demand and traffic for the Met’s first free opera stream last evening, our web site experienced intermittent outages, with users having to wait to access the site or receiving a message that the service was unavailable.

The Met’s IT and On Demand team have been working through the night and this morning to come up with fixes and solutions to make this a smoother user experience.

We urge users, if they can,  to go directly to the Met Opera on Demand apps for Apple, Amazon, and Roku devices and Samsung Smart TV. From there, the user should click on the “Explore the App” option which will take them directly to opera stream page.

We apologize for any inconvenience.