This failure was potentially very serious, especially as it appears to have manifested itself to the crew after committal to landing on a deck. Loss of control (fixed pitch) of the tail rotor is something crews practice regularly in the simulator, but not when landing on helidecks.
Other than the event itself, there's very little information out there. We don't yet know the root cause, whether the AD was complied with, how long the bearing has been installed, whether HUMS picked up anything, etc. Hopefully these answers will be available soon.
henra - the Cougar accident was a loss of tail rotor drive, a very different failure to this one. Immediate entry into autorotation is the only way to recover from loss of tail rotor drive. They were not at a low power setting as the Captain decided to increase speed to normal cruise power despite the co-pilot suggesting it was not a wise thing to do. To draw parallels between this current issue and the Cougar accident is not appropriate.