It doesn't sound like a software problem, especially if there was a popping sound. I've worked with a lot of hardware and it's rare (though possible) that it's software... software still doesn't work that simple, when I was in game design we'd have literally more than billions of lines of code, it was so easy to randomly run into an error, try to trace it for over a week but never once find the error again with nobody else having the error. There's so much at play in the software, it really could only happen for some people, not all, not to mention software can be patched and it's fairly rare for software errors to cause serious problems. Either way, I'm fairly certain this sounds like hardware, and unrelated to the freezing that Nintendo is working on a patch for.

Oh no... the popcorn machine must have popped one kernel too much, and couldn't contain it. Haha. I don't think its software, otherwise it would have frozen the software and been unfixable(which could also be hardware, but not anything physically moving), not broken the hardware. They probably just put a piece in wrong at the factory. Nintendo made their hardware perfect in design and use, but there are people assembling them at a factory that could have possibly messed it up while putting it together.

Exactly. There are always mistakes in assembly lines, human error.