HomePod blinking buttons, not responding

Yesterday evening, one of my HomePods made a loud popping sound, and immediately afterward I noticed the volume control buttons started to blink. The HomePod became unresponsive. I tried to do a factory reset, but it wouldn’t complete.

I did some research and found this was a fairly common problem with no an apparent solution except to buy a new HomePod. Only one person managed to successfully recover his HomePod; he unplugged it and left it alone for a year. When he plugged it in again, it worked.

So I unplugged mine overnight and decided to try again the next day. Wonder of wonders, it let me complete the reset and is now working again. (For now.) Posting about my experience in case it’s of help.

What a weird problem. Unfortunately Apple has little incentive to fix it, given they’ve discontinued the HomePod. Still a great speaker when it works.