This beahviour is sadly is very typical of GoPro.
1. I bought a GoPro HD Hero a few years ago, to take video and stills on a car trip from Paris to Mongolia. We were shooting timelapse of the entire trip, to be compiled at the end.
However, when we were in the middle of Kazakhstan, one day, the camera stops working. I poke around, and see that the filenames havd gone up to DCIM_9999.jpg - and worked out that they had never engineered them to loop back to zero, so the unit had a buffer overflow, and wouldn't work.
We finally got phone access to call a friend, who saw similar threads on their forum. GP refused to acknowledge the bug - they said you had to take out the battery for at least 12 hours, and then it would work. Naturally, this didn't work. Their suggestion was: "If you believe" your unit is faulty, you can send it back to GP in the USA, but you will be liable for freight both ways, and customs import again upon reception."
I emailed them, expecting that because they put such a customer-oriented public face forward, that they'd be decent guys. They were absolutely not.
Finally, 6 months later, they released a firmwire upgrade that fixed the issue. The fix wasn't mentioned in the CHANGELOG.
2. Friend driving across the USA, his unit started recording everything in a deep magenta, for no reason, with no fix.
3. Fast forward to this year, doing an enduro motorbike race across africa. Two friends have the new GP3 cameras - which constantly bug. Out of 15 days of riding, they managed to get about 3 hours of video. The unit would power on - when switched to 'video' mode, the screen would freeze, the unit would suck down power, and empty the battery in 20 minutes. This happened on both units, on the latest firmware.
I have been constantly amazed that a company that tries to push an 'extreme' image hates their customers - and the very people that are trying to do 'extreme' stuff. You have the impression they're just guys making hardware for people doing amazing stuff, and they love what they do. This isn't at all the case, as this latest episode only goes to further illustrate.