NVIDIA apologizes for RTX 3080 order chaos

NVIDIA did a great job getting gamers hyped up for the launch of its RTX 3080, which does offer a huge leap in performance over the last generation. When it came time to sell it yesterday morning, however, the train went a bit off the rails. NVIDIA apparently failed to account for the excitement it created, as the $699 RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition sold out nearly instantly. On top of that, the site went down almost immediately after sales opened, shutting out most buyers.

In a post on its forums (via Gamerant), NVIDIA said “we apologize to our customers for this morning’s experience,” explaining that “the NVIDIA store was inundated with traffic and encountered errors.” It said that managed to resolve the issue and resumed sales, adding that it was taking actions, including manually reviewing orders, to stop bots and scalpers.

However, frustrated buyers figure that the stock was snapped up by bots, with one user tweeting that he “stayed up all night just to get crashed servers and everything sold out within two minutes without me even seeing the item as available.” As Gizmodo noted, plenty of cards have popped up on eBay at double or more the retail price and one Founder’s Edition card apparently sold for $70,000 (there’s one on the site right now that’s been bid up to $43,900 as of 4AM ET today).

As for the lack of stock, NVIDIA said that it’s “shipping more RTX 3080 cards every day to retailers.” Newegg tweeted that it “experienced more traffic than the morning of Black Friday” and sold out of RTX 3080 cards in five minutes, saying “bot protection was in place, orders were human.” The company promised to release more of the cards “as we get more.”