NVIDIA Apologizes for RTX 3080 order Confusion
NVIDIA has done an excellent job of making gamers hype about the release of its RTX 3080, and it has a huge leap in performance over the previous generation. But when it was about to be sold yesterday morning, the train was a bit off track.
NVIDIA failed to explain the excitement of its creation because the $699 RTX 3080 Founders Edition sold out almost immediately. Most importantly, the website shuts down almost immediately after the sale starts, thus shutting out most buyers.
NVIDIA said in an article on its forum (via Gamerant): “We apologize to our customers for the experience this morning and explain:” The NVIDIA store was full of traffic and encountered errors. “It said it managed to solve the problem and resumed sales, adding that it is taking actions, including manual inspection of orders, to stop robots and scalpers.
However, a frustrated buyer believed that the inventory was taken away by the robot. One user wrote on Twitter: “He stayed up all night just to make the server crashed and everything was sold out within two minutes, and I didn’t even see the product available.”
Those wanting RTX 3080 GPUs, here’s some info:
This morning we experienced more traffic than the morning of Black Friday
Limited inventory sold out in 5 mins
We’ll release more as we get more
Bot protection was in place, orders were human
Turn on Auto Notify & check back
— Newegg (@Newegg) September 17, 2020
As Gizmodo pointed out, many cards appeared on eBay with retail prices twice or more than the retail price, and a Founder Edition card sold for $70,000 (as of At 4 a.m. today, the bid on the site has been as high as $43,900).
As for the lack of inventory, NVIDIA said it “ships more RTX 3080 cards to retailers every day.” Newegg tweeted that “the experience is longer than Black Friday morning” and sold out the RTX 3080 card within five minutes, adding that “robot protection is in place and orders are artificial.” The company promised to issue more cards “as we get more.”
