https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2020/09/22/xbox-series-x-and-series-s-pre-orders-are-a-disaster-with-broken-sites-instant-sellouts/#6cc50dda35dd Microsoft decided to throw shade at Sony over their chaotic rollout of PS5 pre-orders. Making a BIG production about how they wouldn't suprise the public and that they'd have an exact date and time for their rollout. The result: A public relations and consumer relations....disaster. It makes Google Stadia's disastrous rollout last year look downright ORDERLY by comparison. My schedule today allowed me to be online right at 11AM EDT when pre-orders were supposed to go live, so I thought I'd give it a shot. My experience was exactly the same as Paul Tassi's. Target's site was a Trojan Horse that let you go through the motions of pre-ordering but kept crashing when you tried to pay for your pre-order. Best Buy crashed coming out of the blocks and didn't come back on line to activate pre-orders for over an hour. I tried pre-ordering one at 12:15....and they were already out of stock. Amazon? Never managed to find anything but a placeholder site....before finally seeing that they were out of stock as well. Meanwhile....on eBay? Scalper Heaven!. All the "Confirmed Pre-order" Series Xs you could possibly want....as long as you're willin to pay about double the retail price. Great JOB, Microsoft. I think we're seeing why Sony did what they did. It wasn't fair....but at least some real customers managed to actually buy their product because the scalpers and their bots couldn't corner the market.