If you are an attorney or an immigrant with a case before the Immigration Court, you’ve probably noticed that the computer system has been down for almost two weeks. The phone system for checking case status is not working, and there are all sorts of problems at the courts and the BIA. Apparently, the cause of these difficulties is that some servers in Fairfax, Virginia are broken and cannot easily be repaired. No one seems to know why this happened, and EOIR (the Executive Office for Immigration Review) is not telling us much. The EOIR website says only that they are experiencing a “hardware failure.”

As a public service, I have decided to step in and fill this information gap with unfounded speculation. I figure that if I take the time to write something down, people might as well believe it. So to all those waiting for the system to start up again, take comfort. I present to you the top 10 reasons that the EOIR computers are not working:

10. Juan Osuna forgot to pay the electric bill.

9. The Y2K bug finally kicked in. 

8. The computer shut itself down after it played 35 million games of tic-tac-toe and learned that it is impossible to “win” a removal case. 

7. It is getting more and more difficult to find new vacuum tubes and punch cards.

6. Once the computer calculated that the average time to the next hearing exceeds the life expectancy of the average respondent, it decided there was no point and turned itself off.

5. Everyone who signed up for Obamacare has accidentally been deported.

4. Someone asked the computer to figure out how the Asylum Clock works, and it blew up.

3. Joe Arpaio arrested the computer for helping “illegals” remain in the U.S.

2. If you build a 500 gigabyte computer, someone will file a 501 gigabyte case.

1. Everyone who knows how to fix a computer has already been deported.

There you have it. Some of these explanations may even prove to bear a relationship to reality. If so, remember that you heard it here first.