From PC Mag: The rocky rollout of Nvidia's RTX 3080 has prompted the company to overhaul its online store in a bid to prevent scalpers and bots from buying up its stock of graphics cards.
In a Monday FAQ, Nvidia said the demand last week was both unprecedented and amplified by automated bots out to buy the card for resellers. “Over 50 major global retailers had inventory on the day of launch. Our retail partners reported record traffic to their sites, in many cases exceeding Black Friday. This caused crashes, delays and other issues for their customers,” the GPU maker said. “We knew the GeForce RTX 3080 would be popular, but none of us expected that much traffic on the first day.”
The launch problems were particularly bad on Nvidia’s own website, which sold a special Founders Edition version of the card for $699. When sales began at 6 a.m. PST on Thursday, many users reported Nvidia’s website instantly featured an “Out of Stock” tag, making it impossible to buy.
Nvidia blamed the error on the flood of traffic to the site, which was 10 times higher than the launch for its last generation of graphics cards. As a result, the company failed to both start the sales at 6 a.m. and notify interested customers via email. When orders did begin, bots quickly scooped up the company’s stock of graphics cards.
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