The Xbox Series X Is Not on Fire, It Is Just Vaping

The Xbox Series X released yesterday and new consoles often mean new problems. In videos on social media, some Series X owners reported that their new consoles were catching on fire and blowing smoke. But as the Verge’s Tom Warren pointed out, it’s much more likely that people are making videos of the Series X blowing smoke by blowing mad vape clouds into it.

The Series X is a quiet and cool system, despite one edge of it being covered in a massive fan. The fan is so powerful that a Redditor has claimed they can use it to float a ping pong ball. In the videos claiming to show the Series X is on fire, the system is always standing tall and the smoke is always pouring out of that massive fan.

Curiously, there’s often no flames in these pictures. The effect is easy to reproduce if you’ve got 

a vape of some kind. A smoker or vaper needs to merely gently blow vape clouds into intake ports on the back of the Series X to then have it billow out of the top of the system. It’s a cool effect and one I tested unscientifically this morning on my own Series X.

I was able to reproduce the smoking Xbox effect by firing up my vape pen and exhaling the vapor into the intake in the back.

As cool as this looks, I don’t recommend doing it. In the PlayStation 2 era, I worked in a Gamestop and I could always tell who smoked around their consoles. The internal workings of a gaming system aren’t meant to take in that smoke and even a cloud of vape juice or THC will leave a residue behind and god knows what to your Series X.