Computer Excuses

Terrorists crashed an airplane into the server room, have to remove /bin/laden. (rm -rf /bin/laden)

greenpeace free'd the mallocs

vi needs to be upgraded to vii

According to Microsoft, it's by design

Mailer-daemon is busy burning your message in hell.

Browser's cookie is corrupted -- someone's been nibbling on it.

overflow error in /dev/null

Zombie processess detected, machine is haunted.

Trojan horse ran out of hay

Hash table has woodworm

Cache miss - please take better aim next time

Hot Java has gone cold

sticky bit has come loose

crop circles in the corn shell

Daemon escaped from pentagram

Internet shut down due to maintainance

Please state the nature of the technical emergency

error: one bad user found in front of screen

Borg nanites have infested the server

Borg implants are failing

Mouse has out-of-cheese-error

Temporal anomaly

Firmware update in the coffee machine

network down, IP packets delivered via UPS

internet is needed to catch the etherbunny

stop bit received

operation failed because: there is no message for this error (#1014)

It's not RFC-822 compliant.

Someone else stole your IP address, call the Internet detectives!

Domain controler not responding

Feature was not beta tested

Repeated reboots of the system failed to solve problem

Sysadmins busy fighting SPAM.

Computer room being moved. Our systems are down for the weekend.

We're out of slots on the server

Maintence window broken

tachyon emissions overloading the system

Cow-tippers tipped a cow onto the server.

Radial Telemetry Infiltration

Traffic jam on the Information Superhighway.

Electrical conduits in machine room are melting.

The vulcan-death-grip ping has been applied.

Computers under water due to SYN flooding.

Route flapping at the NAP.

Bad cafeteria food landed all the sysadmins in the hospital.

Sysadmins unavailable because they are in a meeting talking about why they are unavailable so much.

Sysadmin accidentally destroyed pager with a large hammer.

Sysadmin didn't hear pager go off due to loud music from bar-room speakers.

Secretary sent chain letter to all 5000 employees.

Sales staff sold a product we don't offer.