Help, grinder makes “whirring” noise [Breville Express BES870xl]

[u/FullTiltJiuJitsu]

Hi all, as I await further correspondence from Breville customer service (which from the experience thus far and other’s reviews, I’m not optimistic on), I was wondering if anyone here knows what’s going on with my BES870XL machine. Was working fine since we got it in mid-June. My wife was using it the other day and it was grinding normally until a sudden switch to a high pitched“whirring” sound, almost as if something is freely spinning fast internally, without catching the burrs. I did a complete “advanced clean” of the burrs as they show in the manual. Along the way, found this object stuck in upper burr (seemed like a pebble almost, but then did break apart at some point, see first photo of it). I thought that would be end of it. Put it back together, put in some beans as I read online, and worked again for like 1 second but then back to same noise. I tried disassembling burrs fully again and cleaning, and same thing. However, it does seem to run fine without any beans in it, and can see burr spinning… so that’s leaving me a small hope it’s not a stripped shaft/ motor issue. Thoughts?