On the same day when Microsoft announced that it had sold eight million Kinects, the company is now finding itself facing criticism as consumers claim the accessory is reportedly causing "red ring of death" failures on Xbox 360 consoles.
A report from the BBC as well as posts scattered across Microsoft's Xbox support forums have highlighted the issue. The problems appear shortly after the Kinect is connected, and will render the console unusable. So named because the normally green lights of the Xbox 360's power button turn red, the "red ring of death" indicates a serious error that typically cannot be fixed without sending the console back to Microsoft.
To its defense, the Redmond company has denied that the errors are caused by Kinect. "There is no correlation between the three flashing red lights error and Kinect. Any new instances of the three flashing red lights error are merely coincidental," a spokesperson told the BBC.
Any problem could very well be extremely isolated considering the sheer number of the motion sensing controllers already in consumer's hands. Furthermore, the issue may even be related to an earlier mass failure incident.
In 2007, Microsoft admitted to issues with the first several manufacturing runs of the the Xbox 360, causing a failure rate that claimed to be as high as 30 percent. The issue was believed to be caused by a hardware defect.
Whether or not the two might be related is unknown, and hard to judge based on current failure reports. However, if it is, the issue may trigger yet another expensive recall due to Xbox malfunctions -- the aforementioned incident set the company back as much as $1 billion USD.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
