Warner Bros. announced that it would be dropping 100,000 avatars inspired by the Matrix as NFTs on the Nifty NFT Marketplace. This subsequently caused the website’s purchasing page to crash.
Over 300,000 fans of the Matrix virtually queued up for the drop and Nifty unfortunately had to keep pausing the queue because of max capacity-induced “infrastructure issues”.
In a series of tweets posted by Nifty during the commotion they had this to say about the situation:
“Hello again everyone. While we are obviously still working through the launch not going the way we had hoped it would, we appreciate every single one of you that have hung in with us, and we want to send a very sincere “thank you” from our team.
Even as the queue continues to be paused, we want to ensure you all of a few things – we’re very actively working on a solution, along with our partners. To be as transparent with the community as we can, This is the issue that kept us in this state for so long:
Once we scaled to max capacity, we encountered infrastructure issues, and our team is actively working on a solution with our cloud provider.
The second we have word that we can get this back up and running we will alert you all.
In addition, we HIGHLY suggest you add your email to the “Please notify me when it is my turn:” field, so that you’ll know specifically when you have made it to the front of the line.
On top of that we are also actively working through how to make this right for everyone. More on this soon.
We are working as hard as we can to get these to you all, and thank you again for your patience.”
The problem is, being unable to handle the giant queue led to other issues throughout the website, users were being bounced around the queue, some up, some down, and for some users, even the ‘buy’ button wasn’t working, and their transactions simply failed as they tried to checkout.
Nifty went on to offer every single user that queued up on Tuesday a free NFT dubbed ‘Glitch in the Matrix’ for the inconvenience they experienced. It’s not perhaps the NFT a lot of them hoped for, but it’s not nothing either. I doubt it would end up having much value but maybe it will serve as a nice badge of honour, showing their dedication to the franchise, that they’re willing to wait in a queue of hundreds of thousands for a transaction that might not even go through…
I’m sure the next time Nifty is involved in a major high-profile release it will have learned the lessons necessary to complete it successfully without so many hiccups… Well, I hope so at least…
