Surface Pro is stuck in an "Automatic Repair" and "Diagnosing PC" loop after updating to Windows 8.1.

So I was in school and that morning the Surface was totally fine, and then when I got to a class I noticed that the case I carried the Surface Pro in was suddenly getting really hot so when I opened it, I find my Surface in some kind of menu that I couldn't exit no matter how many times I pressed "Exit Setup."  So then I pressed the lock button on the top and it went to sleep or something and came back on about 10 seconds later with a ":(" icon saying that my PC crashed and that it'll run a diagnostic then restart it for me.  So I patiently waited and eventually the restart occurred, but then I noticed it was in a loop where it keeps going back and forth from a "Automatic Repair" label to a "Diagnosing PC" label, and in between the screen went blank. This went on for the remainder of class which is an hour.  After class, I held the lock button and the loop stopped and went totally black.  At the end of the day I went to press the lock button and the out-of-battery icon popped up.   I came home, plugged in the Surface, and turned it on but it went back into the loop.  Now as I'm typing this question the Surface is off cause I'm scared it's gonna overheat and break or something.  My friend suggested that it was probably the Windows 8.1 update.  He said that there was a faulty file or something and that it was a large problem for a lot of Microsoft Windows 8.1 users.  So my question is; how do I fix this and ensure that it won't happen again?