How does solid state hardware just die?

[elfs]

I got home this evening to have Omaha tell me that we had no wireless. The two wired machines still had Internet access, so the router was fine. The old bridge, a Linksys WAP11 v1.1 showed a solid light on above its ethernet port, and no light at all on the wireless port. Every attempt to communicate with it, either via ethernet or the USB connector, was rebuffed. The thing was dead.

After dinner I drove out to Frys and in an hour had a new 802.11g Linksys WAP54G up and running. I even reprogrammed it to use DHCPC so I won't have to scan the entire network looking for the damn thing next time, and told my DHCPC server to preserve its MAC-to-IP address across reboots. It has better security now. Yamaraashi-chan was having a nastier case of Internet withdrawl than either Omaha or I.

But how does this happen? Linksys WAPs are solid state. It's sat in our pantry for the past eight years (the last time I downloaded drivers for it, the most common version of Windows was 98!), quietly ticking away, doing its job. It has no fan, no hard drive, no moving parts at all. I've only updated the flash four or five times in its life. Why would it suddenly just keel over and die in the middle of a transaction like that?