Something somewhat similar to this has happened to my 990 on 2 occasions. The unit was up and running and I would walk over to it to turn the volume up or down. As soon as I touched the volume knob, there was a static electricity shock and all of the text on the front display turned off. The light remained blue and I can't really remember if picture/sound were still going through.

Pressing the standby button twice got the unit working again. Clearly, static electricity had something to do with my incident - not sure if it is at all related to yours...