Japanese company Sony has issued a warning to customers worldwide that a glitch affecting more than half a million of its VAIO laptop computers may cause overheating and possible burns.
The electronics firm said a heat-monitoring chip in some of its VAIO F and C series models launched in January this year could be defective.
Although the defect has not been known to cause personal injuries, the company said it had received 39 complaints from overseas customers saying that the shape of their computers became distorted from overheating.
The glitch affects 535,000 laptops worldwide, of which nearly half are in the United States and the rest in Japan, Europe and China.
In Washington, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a voluntary recall of the 233,000 computers in the US.
Sony is offering consumers a software application download with which to correct the malfunction.
