A setback for the LHC

After it's much applauded launch the LHC has hit a glitch and been shut down. A CERN press release today said:

Preliminary investigations indicate that the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure...

A full investigation is underway, but it is already clear that the sector will have to be warmed up for repairs to take place. This implies a minimum of two months down time for LHC operation. For the same fault, not uncommon in a normally conducting machine, the repair time would be a matter of days.

This doesn't seem to be a major or unexpected setback. As they say, if this were at normal temperatures the repair would take only a few days, but because of the extreme cold needed for the superconducting magnets the cycle of warming things up, making the repair and re-cooling the system could take weeks.

The main loss is time, sadly, and a few tons of liquid helium^*.
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UPDATE:
The BBC calls the incident 'a quench' which to me implies that the particle beam has hit the wall of the tube. However the CERN report above says there was no beam circulating at the time. Hmmm, I'm waiting to find out.
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* Listen here for a 7min podcast on the discovery, uses and rarity of helium on Earth. From Chemistry in it's Element.