The ultra-cheap Raspberry Pi computer went on sale on Wednesday morning, with a torrent of demand crashing the websites of the companies selling it.
Demand for the cheap Raspberry Pi computer has crashed vendors' websites.Image credit: Raspberry Pi
Raspberry
Pi is a £22 ARM-based Linux computer aimed at getting children
into programming — a cheaper, £16 version is set to arrive soon.
The credit card-sized devices are being manufactured in China, but
also in the UK, under a licensed manufacturing agreement that will see
the Raspberry Pi Foundation charity receive royalties.
Apparently some of you are VERY ANGRY. We're really sorry; it's out of our hands.
– Raspberry Pi Foundation
It was the British manufacturers, Premier Farnell and RS
Components, who started offering the Raspberry Pi in the early hours
of Wednesday morning, albeit not for very long. Both companies' sites
were swiftly brought down by the weight of demand.
The Raspberry Pi
Foundation's own site temporarily shifted to showing just a static
page, but Premier Farnell and RS Components's sites were effectively
broken
for a while.
"We warned both partners, but the traffic has been just
ridiculous," the foundation said
in one of a long series of exasperated posts to Twitter. Another message read:
"We're so frustrated about the DDoS effect — and apparently some
of you are VERY ANGRY. We're really sorry; it's out of our hands."
Both RS Components and Premier Farnell have their sites back up and
running, and are now taking pre-orders for the Raspberry Pi.
As the foundation explained on its site, both of the companies
have the capacity to build the devices to match demand, and both have
worldwide distribution networks so people in other countries do not
have to have the computers shipped from the Foundation itself.
At the moment, customers can only order one Raspberry Pi each. The
foundation said batch ordering would become possible in about a
month's time. As educational use of the cheap computer would
involve batch quantities, this would suggest that those accidentally
crashing the suppliers' sites on Wednesday morning were individual
enthusiasts rather than schools.
Although the government has not actively funded the Raspberry Pi
initiative, it has been vocally supportive. Education secretary
Michael Gove said
in January that the scheme "could bring the same excitement as the
BBC Micro did in the 1980s", and that it was "being carefully watched
by education and technology experts all over the world".
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