How to fix the black screen of death on Xbox One S

Almost everyone remembers the infamous “red ring of death“, an Xbox 360 hardware malfunction in which the console’s power ring would turn red and the console would simply stop working. The issue was finally fixed after Microsoft dropped $ 1 billion on it But now there’s another flaw plaguing today’s Xbox consoles: the so-called “black screen of death”.

Yeah, we’re apparently going with “death” again, although I wish we could at least be a little more creative this time around. “Console purge,” perhaps?

“Black screen of death” is at least an apt term, as it describes the problem literally. Players who have encountered him turn on their Xbox One consoles, only to see a completely blank screen. The timeless trick of “turning it off and back on” doesn’t seem to do anything. No more than that of “unplugging it and plugging it in again”.

The black screen of death appears to have largely affected those who signed up as Xbox Insider, a membership program that allows gamers to test upcoming console features before they are rolled out on a large scale. Sometimes there are bugs, but having the first access to this stuff is often a godsend. For example, Xbox Insiders received early access to ballyhooed game suspension feature, which dramatically speeds up downloads on Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S. New updates are released periodically, sometimes every few days, and it looks like this wave of black screens is a bug related to one of these recent fixes.

Read more: How to sign up for the Xbox Insider program

In a blog post from August 20 Describing the release notes for beta-level members (Xbox Insider is tiered), Microsoft said the black screen of death issue has been resolved. Microsoft said the same in a blog post from August 17, too much. (This note is not present in Microsoft Message of August 13 about Xbox Insider beta level updates, suggesting it’s the fix that triggered it.)

On the other side social media, the players say they continue to meet him en masse. Gamers say a factory reset on the console, while a total pain to put everything back in place, does the trick. Of course, it might sound like something you, you know, need a screen for, but it is possible to complete the process with a USB stick.

The Xbox One Black Screen of Death isn’t entirely new. Last year and the year before, many Xbox one s the owners wrote on the Microsoft Support Forums to describe a problem with the console. The dashboard looks like a game has been corrupted, so user would turn off the Xbox, then turn it back on. Boom. Black screen of death. In this case, Microsoft recommended power on the console.

When contacted to comment on the Black Screen of the Second Coming of Death, a Microsoft representative had nothing to add immediately.