I have used the Kindle Fire almost daily since it first hit the market in late 2011. I even take it with me when I travel and use it to retrieve e-mail and surf the web whenever I am with range of an available WiFi network. It has always been a reliable backup for my iPhone. That is why I was very surprised when it locked up this morning.
When the Kindle Fire locked up, it locked up rock solid. It was totally frozen and did not respond to anything on the screen. The screen simply displayed the background image and the top menu, but nothing worked. The normal shut-down mode which consists of pressing the power button for a few seconds did not work.
It appears that this is an intermittent problem with the Fire. I did some research and found the solution, although the solution only does a hard reset of the Kindle and nothing that I found on the web indicates what caused the problem.
The solution is to simply press and hold the power button for 20 seconds. This initiates a hard restart. When I did that, the Kindle rebooted after about 15 seconds. I have not seen any problems since then.
If this does not work, Amazon does have Kindle Support phone numbers that you can call.
USA and Canada: 1-866-216-1072 or 1-866-321-8851
International: 1-206-266-2992