PS4 Glitches: Sabotage By Unpaid Foxconn Interns Blamed For PlayStation 4 Woes

The PS4 glitches are rumored to be caused by sabotage by unpaid Foxconn workers working in the PlayStation 4 assembly lines. (For a guide on repairing your PS4 Blue Light of Death, click this link.)

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, back in October preparations for the PS4 launch party were marred by rumors of the PlayStation 4 assembly line forcing college students into unpaid work.

Foxconn is the manufacturing company responsible for making the PlayStation 4 hardware in addition to many other contracts, even including parts for the Xbox One and Wii U. But in order to meet the deadline set for the PS4 release date, Foxconn allegedly pressured Chinese students at China’s Xi’an Institute of Technology into taking jobs at the PlayStation 4 assembly line or they’d risk losing college credits necessary to graduate. Foxconn officials responded to the controversy by denying the rumors and claimed the students were “voluntarily” working at the factory.

One of the PS4 sabotage rumors claims lead was put into thermal paste in order to make the PlayStation 4 GPU and CPU malfunction over time due to heat issues:

“A Chinese guy posted on here like two weeks ago in really fractured English or translation. He mentioned “PheonixStation 4? and that they have put a trace amount of lead in a good majority of the thermal paste used in the PS4 batches. He said this will mean heat won’t dissipate quick enough for standby mode when the fans are programmed to a low RPM, and this will degrade the life of the CPU/GPU dramatically and also raise temps during operating by a few degrees more than normal.”

If you will recall, the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death was blamed on a lack of lead in the solder and, back in the day, thermal paste used to contain some lead. The claim is that the lead would eat away at the silver in the thermal paste and make it less effective over time. Besides drying out the thermal paste faster, lead does have a heat transfer coefficient that’s less than a tenth of silver, so it’s possible overheating could become an issue if this were true.

Further evidence for sabotage causing the PS4 glitches appeared in a thread in a Chinese forum set up for the Xi’an Technological University North Institute, the university with the students alleged forced to work at Foxconn. The post is translated as saying:

“Since Foxconn are not treating us well, we will not treat the PS4 console well. The PS4 console we assemble can be turned on at best.”

But this thread was quickly deleted. Since it’s China, we can’t be certain if this was due to censorship or if the claims about PS4 sabotage were known to be a hoax. But in a more recent post, another Chinese user claims people shouldn’t blame the PS4 glitches on Foxconn’s unpaid interns:

“If the system is broken, don’t blame us students. When we were studying, they shipped in 20,000 migrant workers from Guizhou. On top of that, there were also many Yantai local students and long-time Foxconn workers at the factories. The people that made the news were us Xi’an Technological University North Institute students. We’re not even 1/10 of the workers at Foxconn. So don’t blame the issue on us Chinese students, and don’t talk about Foxconn on this board. You have no idea how hard it was to work in the factories as a recent high school graduate. Feel free to ask questions about the PS4 but not about Foxconn.”

The same post also assigns blame to the Taiwanese management at Foxconn. And, of course, it was taken down pronto.

But, at the end of the day, all we have for evidence of sabotage causing the PS4 glitches is anonymous posts on Chinese forums. Even though Foxconn has a history of abusing its workers (they even installed suicide nets in the worker dorms because it’s so bad) there’s no way to tell if these rumors are true and Sony has not officially responded to any of these allegations.

Do you believe the allegations about PlayStation 4 sabotage causing the PS4 glitches?