Report: One in six failure rate for xbox

San Francisco (CA) - About one in every six Xbox 360 consoles suffers from the "red rings of death" or other problems causing it to be disabled.

The report is published from SquareTrade, a firm that looks into product warranties. The firm looked at 1000 Xbox 360s and found that 164 of them eventually failed.

SquareTrade also looked at the Wii and Playstation 3, and found their failure rates were around 3%.

According to the report, 60% of the sample consoles that broke down were a result of the "red rings of death," an error message that manifests itself by glowing red lights on the front of the device.

SquareTrade CEO Steve Abernathy noted the reality may be even worse for Microsoft. "It is reasonable to believe these failure rates will increase over time, since the Xbox 360 failure issues tend to increase with prolonged use where overheating appears the main culprit," he said.