The day after I did my Xbox 360 Breaks -- And Almost A Month To Wait For Repairs post, Dave Naylor IMd me to say his Xbox had the red circle of death just happen as well. Hmm. I had noticed that when I searched for support, a number of people suddenly seemed to be having this, the three flashing red lights problem. Plus, the issue was a featured support notice on the Xbox site, when I had gone there. Turns out, there's been a plague of failures -- and Microsoft is reacting by extending warranties to three years.

There's an open letter about it here from Microsoft, covering how warranties are being extended, people are being given credit if they got out-of-warranty repairs and so on. Nice. Especially nice when I found the paperwork for my warranty and was debating if I should pay the $100 to extend it for an additional year (I was still covered under the original one through September). A FAQ provides more details here. Both link to the US site. While this is being done worldwide, the UK XBox site still has no news posted.

Bloomberg says it will cost Microsoft over $1 billion for the repairs. Hey, ship me an Xbox Elite, and we can negotiate on repairing my old unit! The Times reports how some repair centers were rejecting any further units, because they were getting swamped. Apparently, my unit that went out yesterday to nearby Hampshire will instead head to Prague. And one center says the problem was due to motherboards overheating, causing solder to melt (Microsoft officially says there are a variety of reasons). Via Engadget, one report says nearly 1/3 of units are crashing.

Techmeme has a round-up of more. Ironically, Microsoft support was very insistent that my Xbox should not be sent back in the original box. No problem. I no longer had it. Instead, I looked around the garage for a similarly sized box. I should have taken a picture. It went back in my Wii box.

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