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.
(Credit: Nvidia)
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.
“This is the first time that we have seen bots at this scale and sophistication,” the company added.
Their success may have been due to an exposed API for Nvidia's online store. This enabled automated bots to immediately check the product's inventory and place orders, according to Twitter user @CollectableCat, who tried and failed to buy the RTX 3080 on day one, but noticed the exposed API, which remains active.
"The thing that makes it (the API) faster is they can check directly to the e-commerce backend bypassing the frontend store, which was also crashing at the time," @CollectableCat told PCMag.
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The good news is that the bots didn’t buy up everything. “While individuals using bots may have shown images of email inboxes filled with confirmed orders, Nvidia has cancelled hundreds of orders manually before they were able to ship,” the company said. Canceled units were then routed to vetted legitimate customers, a company spokesman told PCMag.
The GPU maker hasn't commented on the exposed API. But to prevent the bots from striking again, Nvidia says it’s upgrading its online store with new safeguards as it prepares to launch the RTX 3090 on Thursday.
“We moved our Nvidia Store to a dedicated environment, with increased capacity and more bot protection,” it said. “We updated the code to be more efficient on the server load. We integrated CAPTCHA to the checkout flow to help offset the use of bots. We implemented additional security protections to the store APIs. And more efforts are underway.”
Unfortunately, the FAQ doesn’t offer any immediate relief for buyers eager to buy the RTX 3080. For now, Nvidia’s message is to keep checking your favorite retailer for availability. But the company is promising more units will be arriving soon.
“The GeForce RTX 3080 is in full production,” the company said. “We began shipping GPUs to our partners in August, and have been increasing the supply weekly. Partners are also ramping up capacity to meet the unprecedented demand.” It urged people not to buy "from opportunistic resellers who are attempting to take advantage of the current situation.
To find an RTX 3080 model, you can use Nvidia's product finder.
Further Reading
- PC Gamers Troll RTX 3080 Scalpers With Fake eBay Listings, Review Bombs
- Nvidia Signals RTX 3080 Founders Edition Will Be Back in Stock Next Week
- How a Bot Bought Dozens of RTX 3080 Units Before Consumers Could Grab Them
- Nvidia Is Manually Reviewing RTX 3080 Orders to Stop Scalpers
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