Magazine: Xbox 360 failure rate has dropped to 10%

Slowly but surely, the Red Rings of Death have been appearing less and less on the Xbox 360, as the failure rate has halved over the past year from 20% in 2010 to 10% in 2011, according to a magazine survey.

According to a survey in PC Mag as a part of their “Reader’s Choice Awards”, 10% of those who responded to the survey said they had to send their Xbox 360 back to Microsoft at least once last year. The same PC Mag survey in 2010 had the failure rate around 20%, which was an even more dramatic drop from the year before. In 2009, a whopping 51% of the Xbox 360’s shipped experienced a defect that required the gamer to send it back to Microsoft.

This is mostly attributable to the launch of the Xbox 360 Slim a year ago, and the revamped configurations to the original Xbox 360’s Xenon design.

Have you experienced serious hardware issues with your Xbox 360 in the past year? Let us know.