The Xbox 360 video game console can be subject to a number of technical problems which render it unusable. Those problems are identified as "general hardware failures", and are indicated through a red ring of light around the power button. Since its release in 2005, the consoles' build quality has acquired a bad reputation both in the eyes of the press, with articles portraying its poor reliability and high failure rates, and with the general public. The three glowing rings have been nicknamed the "Red Ring of Death."
Several video game blogs, newspapers and magazines Wired, Kotaku, Joystiq, The Inquirer, GamePro, G4, The Guardian, Gizmodo, Slashdot.org, Xbox 360 Fanboy, GayGamer.net, Engadget, YahooGames , and several others reported on an interview by a Seattle PI Reader Blog "Digital Joystick" with an alleged confidential source inside Microsoft by the name "xboxfounder". It reported that this source was a team leader and key architect in the creation of the Xbox and Xbox 360 and a founding member of the Xbox team and has since left the company but maintained close ties to the remaining Xbox team.
The interviews suggest that Xbox 360 units that fail early in their life due to a problems in the system design, parts supply, material reliability, and manufacturing problems as well as a system not tolerant to faults. These issues were said to be the end results of the decisions of management in Microsoft's Xbox team and inadequate testing resources prior to the console's release. Other web-sites claim the insider's authenticity has been confirmed.
In the early months after the console's launch, Microsoft stated that the Xbox 360's failure rate was within the consumer electronics industry average of 3% to 5%. Nevertheless, Microsoft has not released their official statistics on the failure rate of the various versions of the console; the company's press relations policy is to focus on the prompt resolution of any technical problems. Even so, rumors abounded that the initial failure rate of the "Xenon" motherboard based Xbox 360 may have been as high as 33% and is still substantially more than industry average. In February 2008 an examination of 1040 Xbox 360s by SquareTrade found a 16.4% failure rate. 171 were returned under warranty as "disabled", 60% with general hardware failure.
On July 5, 2007, the Vice-President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division published an open letter recognizing the console's problems, as well as announcing a 3 year warranty expansion for every Xbox 360 console that experiences the "general hardware failure" indicated by three flashing red LED lights on the console.
