They have to deny it, because they are getting sued by several people.

If the Austrian recovery experts really found tons of epoxy resins on the newer revisions of the boards (boards they deemed too small for the components WD put on them) then the evidence is pretty damning.

It’s a soft denial.

“While we are working to gather more information, at this time we do not believe hardware issues played a role in the product concerns that we successfully addressed with the firmware update.”

Basically they left the door wide open to eventually admit the hardware is to blame. They also left the door open to claim that the hardware issue is separate from the issue they “fixed” with the firmware update.