PS5 Push Square
Image: Damien McFerran / Push Square

Questionable claims that positioning your PS5 vertically could eventually break it have been spread online over the past 24 hours. However, with so few examples of a flaw touted by a French repair shop, it's very unlikely to be something you actually need to worry about. Along with another console repair store, both suggest a design flaw in the PS5's innards could cause liquid metal to spill out of its casing and damage other components, thus bricking the system.

Used to cool the console, the claims mention a potential seal breakage between the APU (accelerated processing unit) and its cooler, which would then leak liquid metal onto other bits and pieces. The theory is that if your PS5 is placed horizontally, the substance won't go anywhere — it'll simply stay put in its casing. However, if the system is vertical, then there's the risk of liquid metal seeping out.

Those discussing the claim suggest it loses a lot of credibility when to even have the possibility of liquid metal leak out of its casing, "something bad" needs to happen to the seal protecting it. Buried within the PS5's other components, the chances of that happening appear minuscule. The two repair shops warn this flaw will cause the system to overheat and damage the motherboard. But if you're already moving your PS5 around so much and vandalizing it to the point where a small casing inside it has been broken, then you may already have a bigger problem.

While the two stores share evidence of the liquid metal leaking out of its casing in tweets, it's such a small sample size — and doesn't mention the possibility of user-made damage elsewhere — that there's really nothing to worry about here. The official line from Sony is the system will work in both the horizontal and vertical orientations. Otherwise, it wouldn't have designed it to have padding on the bottom to be placed flat or shipped the system with a stand so it can be put upright.

Should the situation change or new evidence comes to surface, we'll be sure to update you with more information. Until then, though, claims of PS5 breakage from such a small sample size can't be taken as evidence of a wider problem that Sony overlooked. Have you, by any chance, encountered this problem at all? Let us know in the comments below.

[source wololo.net]