red ring of death

A term given to the three red flashing lights glowing around the power button of an Xbox 360 console when it experiences general hardware failure (or, in a simpler term, crashes).

It is much more serious than a "Blue Screen of Death" in a Windows computer, since the Red Ring of Death means something is seriously messed up inside the hardware, thus (in most cases) cannot be resolved by a reboot. Gained notority when statistics show that more than a third of XBox 360 sets have this problem.