It appears that it took Sony a couple of hours to launch and pull the 2.40 firmware update. Apparently, some consoles reacted badly to this and failed to boot afterwards.
Sony called this a minor problem, and said that this will only be temporary. It’s important to note that not all users have this problem as a great majority of users updated their babies and they’re working just fine.
Some users also had problems with XMB in-game access or trophies menu that would result in freezing the system, but they had no major malfunctions that would result in a broken system.
This firmware update should, among other features, introduce new ones such as XMB in-game access, trophies, etc. However, as much as the trophies feature was touted, we now know that trophies will have to be handled by games, and will not be featured with older games.