The failure rate on Microsoft's Xbox 360 games console is now so great that some UK-based repair centres are refusing to fix the device.

For many months, owners have complained of the so-called 'Red Ring of Death' syndrome, named after the blinking red lights on the front of the console when it has failed due to overheating.

The problem has now become so widespread, however, that some centres are turning customers away because they have become deluged and, they say, there's little they can do to fix the machines.

Microsoft's own repair centre in Havant, Hampshire - one of the few remaining places where customers can send the devices - is now so swamped with returns that it is reportedly sending them to repair centres in Prague to get fixed.

Micromart, an established game console repairer in Northumberland, is now turning away 30 machines a week with 'Red Ring' because its fix for the problem wasn't satisfactory.

"It's a motherboard problem," Geoff Croft, a support representative at Micromart, said. "There's a lot of components soldered onto it, and because of the overheating, there's faulty contact between the parts and the motherboard."

Diarmid Andrews, a director at GT Electronics, a Dundee-based repairer which is still offering to fix the machines despite having only a 70 per cent success rate, said: "It's a big, big issue. My estimate is that about a quarter to a third of units are experiencing this problem."

Mr Andrews said his company was now getting more than 100 Xboxes with 'Red Ring' a week, and had taken on 3 extra staff to cope with demand.

Microsoft refused to confirm reports that it was sending machines to Prague to cope with the volume of returns, but a support worker on the company's Xbox 360 helpline appeared to say that some machines were sent there, before saying he was not at liberty to disclose such information.

A report on 360 gamer, an online magazine, said that one customer, having waited weeks for his machine to be returned, rang Microsoft's customer support line, only to be told that it was still in the Czech Republic.

Microsoft said in a statement: "There is no single root cause or systemic issue with any of the Xbox 360 consoles. With such a complex consumer electronic product that contains more than 1700 different components, there are obviously many things that can malfunction at any given time."

Microsoft has sold about 1.3 million Xboxes in the UK since the device was released at the end of 2005, according to Screen Digest.

The increased failure rate in recent months had come to light because the warranty period on machines bought soon after release had just expired, experts said.

Simon Brew, managing editor at Micro Mart, a weekly technology magazine, said: "Red Ring certainly is a problem. The bigger issue, though, is how quickly you can turn around repairs, though."

Nick Parker, an analyst with Screen Digest, said he thought the estimates of returns were "inflated", but agreed that even if the volume of repairs was that large, the "bigger question" for Microsoft was the turnaround time. "If it's taking you 2-3 weeks to get an Xbox back to a customer, that is a problem," he said.

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