The festive season is here, and as is tradition, people have dusted off their ugliest sweaters to help celebrate this jolly time of the year. Over at Microsoft, employees are getting into the swing of things with an ugly sweater that celebrates one of the ugliest moments of Xbox history: the infamous red ring of death that plagued the Xbox 360 early in its console lifecycle.
In addition to a power button that can display both the green and the crimson symbols, the sweater also has an interesting arrangement of green and yellow stripes. As spotted by The Verge, it’s only currently available to Microsoft employees through the company’s store, and stock has already sold out.
Anyone who owned an Xbox 360 early on likely experienced a red ring of death hardware failure, as this was a widespread issue that turned the console into a paperweight. This was a major problem for Microsoft at the time, and in the 2021 web series Power On, the company explained how it happened.
According to Leo Del Castillo, a member of Xbox’s hardware engineering group, the red ring of death was caused by connectors inside the console’s components that broke as a result of rapid heating and cooling. This problem–combined with thermal and stress issues in the Xbox 360 related to its soldering balls–eventually resulted in bricked consoles.
Microsoft’s solution at the time was to repair and return the affected Xbox 360 at no cost to the consumer–an expensive fix that became a “1.15 billion dollar problem” according to former head of Xbox Peter Moore. Future hardware revisions of the Xbox 360 mostly managed to prevent this issue from occurring, and successor consoles like the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S haven’t faced any major hardware failures on this scale.