NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

Or, and hear me out, aliens...

There are a number of possibilities. We likely will never know what actually happened. A bit flip would be bad, but potentially fixable. If they can somehow force a reset. It could also be simple component failure, a bad capacitor, in the wrong place, and your computer goes haywire. Ditto for mechanical damage. A grain of dust, hitting the wrong point could cause a cascade of problems.

The backup systems are long dead. The fact they've managed to extend the mission life by 41 years is quite incredible. It was never expected to last this long.

God speed V'ger!

This was my take. No way to retain memory anymore.

That's very likely what happened. The problem is that the control board that manages communications is so old that nobody can find any documentation on how it works, so they can't even begin to figure out a fix.

Everyone involved with that project is also probably dead.