It's thought to be a rare event when minor components bring entire lines of product down, but it has happened before. Recently, Phillips has recalled nearly 12,000 plasma flat panel televisions. This is due to capacitors that actually arc inside the chassis of the TV, resulting in a risk of fire or explosion from the capacitors. Luckily, the TVs were designed to prevent that. The particular capacitors that cause the problem are part of the Ambilight feature, which lets the TV emit colors along the sides of itself to match the color on the screen better.

This isn't the first time we've seen this happen - there are hundreds of thousands of motherboards in the market that have capacitors designed from a stolen formula, and it is quite often to see those boards go up in smoke as the capacitors start to prematurely fail. It affected many manufacturers.