Why were so many cheap power supplies failing during the 2010s?

Defective electrolytic capacitors were a major industry problem around the late 1990s through the 2000s. Poor capacitor chemistry and faulty seals caused capacitors to swell, leak, or fail, and power supplies are especially sensitive because they contain large, heavily stressed capacitors. Thermal stress and bad solder joints could cause similar failures. A unit might pass a basic factory test and then die soon afterward, which helps explain both the dead-on-arrival reports and the short lifespans.

The capacitor issue was not limited to power supplies. Computer builders and repair technicians also saw huge numbers of motherboards fail because of bad capacitors. Those failures were sometimes blamed on the processor platform instead of the component problem, which made the pattern even more confusing. As manufacturers improved sourcing, testing, and product standards—and as buyers became more aware of PSU quality—the worst examples became less common, even though cheap unreliable units still exist.

There was also a much larger market for unbranded and knockoff power supplies than there is now. Online marketplaces were full of units with inflated wattage ratings and little meaningful safety or reliability testing. Better brands were relatively expensive, so buyers often chose the cheapest option and retailers encouraged that with bundle deals. The problem did not necessarily represent one single scandal; it was a combination of weak designs, poor manufacturing, bad components, and consumers having few easy ways to distinguish a safe budget PSU from a dangerous one.

A likely explanation is that many of these brands were selling very low-cost designs made by a relatively small number of original manufacturers. Cutting costs meant using undersized components, weak quality control, and sometimes questionable or counterfeit parts. If one factory or component supplier had a bad production run, the same problem could appear under several different brand names. The cheapest units also had almost no reason to compete on reliability, since retailers could keep selling them as loss leaders or bundle items.