Nvidia apologizes for GeForce RTX 3080 launch problems

To say the launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 was rocky would be an understatement. The company’s new flagship graphics card went on sale at 9 AM ET on September 17. However, almost immediately after becoming available, websites everywhere suffered processing issues and quickly found themselves out of stock.

In fact, the launch went so poorly for consumers that Nvidia felt compelled to apologize via a statement on its forums.

“This morning we saw unprecedented demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 at global retailers, including the NVIDIA online store,” the company said. “At 6 a.m. pacific we attempted to push the NVIDIA store live. Despite preparation, the NVIDIA store was inundated with traffic and encountered an error. We were able to resolve the issues and sales began registering normally.”

The statement goes on to say that orders are being manually reviewed to curb scalpers and bots from scooping up all of the available product from the Nvidia store.

“We’re doing everything humanly possible,” Nvidia said.

Flooded retailers

As far as other outlets are concerned, Newegg put out a statement stating that all orders for the card are genuine.

“This morning we experienced more traffic than the morning of Black Friday Limited [and] inventory sold out in 5 minutes,” the retailer said via a Twitter. “We’ll release more as we get more.”

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

Regarding more product, Nvidia said that it’s shipping out more cards to its 50-plus global retailer partners every day.

Despite the statement from Nvidia and stores like Newegg claiming that the companies are working to stop scalpers from profiting, it may not be working fully just yet. As of writing, there are over 700 listings on eBay for the RTX 3080 graphics card, with most asking for the same, if not more than, retail price of the upcoming RTX 3090.

Slated to launch on September 24, those who are looking to pick up an RTX 3090 should hope that Nvidia finds a better way to handle that launch than it did for the RTX 3080.