First off, back in around of 2011 (I think), I visited one of my old neighbors house, and there was a vintage Sanyo? desk fan in it. Although everything was normal during I tried to mess around with it by simply moving it into another spot, suddenly the fan produced some burning smells, and it actually released some smokes out of the fan itself and sprayed it straight into my face. After that occurred, obviously it popped the whole house's circuit breaker, and everybody in that house were panicking due to how I burned out the fan itself... Thankfully, the fan itself didn't set ablaze even more during the burnout happened, so they decided to trash it away after all of that... From what I remembered about why it occurred, probably due to it only had 110v of voltage (which meant it was connected to step-down transformer from 220v to 110v all the time), but I stupidly plugged it directly into a 220v wall outlet, which was obvious about why I burned it out.
Secondly, this was occurred on one of my mini portable fans that I have. The one that got burned out is the AC powered ventilating fan that I used to have, and it was branded Matsuviva. I even recorded both original and remake YouTube fan videos of it back in 2014 and 2015, although you couldn't even see any better look of my original video of it, due to how I stupidly record videos in potato quality of my old Samsung Galaxy Y phone in those days... During I suddenly burned it out, I was stupidly had fun by playing around with it due to some boredom that happened to me. Then, it produced some burning smells, then POP! The fan just stopped working due to the sudden pop'n sparky burnout that suddenly occurred, yet it also popped my whole house's circuit breaker. After that happened, since it wasn't working anymore, I obviously trashed it away, and that's it.
There are even more of how I suddenly burned out some fans too, but I couldn't tell anything detail about more of them, because most of them weren't technically "burned out" or something other that weren't just typical fan burnouts, such as loose wire connections, bad capacitor, bad bearings, and so on. Anyway, that's it from my short story about how I did burn out some fans that I encountered, and hope you can pay attention about this post.