Did it eventually turn back on? Maybe after charging it for a while? If so, it would be a bad battery. (Phone batteries can develop dendrites when they're at 100%, so the fact that it was at 75% wouldn't matter. And a large enough dendrite would short the battery long enough to shut the phone off.)
If they couldn't bring the phone back into operation, I can't see how they could determine that it was a software problem. They could guess, but they'd most likely have been wrong.