My iPad is malfunctioning?!

My new iPad mini 2 is stuck alternating between the process it goes through to turn on and the process it goes through to turn off. It s been doing that for hours. It was fine last night-the only unusual thing I did was changing the date and time to a really long time ago (in order to use the time cheat on a game I m addicted to). Otherwise, everything was perfectly normal until the battery died (which I was expecting to happen). I plugged it in to charge it this afternoon, and it appeared to be stuck on the turning-on screen with the apple on the white background for a ridiculously long time. At one point it started to function like it normally would, with the major exception that it would take 30 seconds or more to show any kind of response to anything I did. After a few moments, it shut down and began the aforementioned cycle. I haven t downloaded any programs that could potentially give it a virus. Has anyone else had this happen, and, more importantly, does anyone have any idea what might be going on?

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