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.
