While I can't definitively claim that this won't work for everyone, I attempted to roll my firmware back and it didn't help. Sent a note to bitmain as I'm guessing it's a bad controller board.

Quick update - 3 out of 4 S9s came up after about 15 minutes. The one troublemaker has been up for about five hours and continues to exhibit the same problem. I let it 'idle' for about an hour and then try a hard reboot (pull the power, wait 30 sec, apply power). I'll let it continue for the remainder of the day and contact Bitmain if it continues on like this.

Just received a batch of four S9s today and am having the same difficulties as described above. One thing to note, my 'miner status' page finally came to life after waiting about 10 minutes. I have D3s and L3s and am accustomed to them quickly displaying the stats.