It should not be. But you need to capture what the failure is by monitoring the terminal output continuously…
It could be the power supply. Current rating?
Is it in a box?
Is it running from a SD card?
What is the connectivity method, RJ45? WIFI?
Is there a cape?
More information will help.
Gerald
I have now ordered extended temp. BBB’s from two different sources and both failed to work.
We use them by first loading Debian 3.8.13-bone50 via the USB stick.
In one case it failed to boot (just power light on), in the other it sometimes power boots, sometimes not and
even if it boots, it doesn’t load the drivers for the USB stick consistently.
Never had any problems with the std. units, even loading a 2GB OS and then running resize2fs.