Broken UK Xbox 360s get free trip to Prague
Gadgets dying is an inevitable part of a tech-rich life, and if your Xbox 360 has recently required an ambulance ride to Microsoft you're probably pacing up and down by the mailbox in anticipation of its return. So spare a thought for the UK gamers who found out that while they'd dispatched their carefully-packaged console to an official Microsoft repair centre in Havant, a large number of them were being reshipped to Prague before they'd actually get looked at. It's all because they're getting around 1,500 to 2,500 consoles in to look at every day.
That's right, 2,500 broken Xbox 360s, overwhelming the Havant centre and so they've outsourced the diagnostics and repair process – and the delay in returning it – to a plant in Prague. Doing so gives them a ten-day extension, legally, to process the console.
It's all come out thanks to a member of fansite 360Gamer where owners have been swapping tales of woe. Lee Sherman, who finds himself in the unfortunate position of having unwittingly sent his machine on a European holiday, managed to contact the Prague site (having had to search out the number online, thanks to Microsoft telling him that it didn't actually have a phone number) and confirm the huge numbers of faulty units they get in and the scale of the outsourcing.
So far Microsoft have failed to comment officially.