A lightning strike may cause an surge which in turn may cause transient electrical faults to be generated. Anybody who has had an APU/Gen trip on him will know that. These faults mostly clear out but some remain on the STATUS page (on EICAS) till the landing gear does a full extension and retraction cycle (i.e. next landing). This status message(s) may have been transmitted by ACARS to maintenance as the ACARS reporting logic does not factor in lightning strikes. It is plausible that the airplane may have had several lightning strikes and that caused several (maybe) erroneous messages to be generated. Also explains the 4 minutes of ACARS transmission (because a regular position report also takes a couple of seconds of transmission (VHF in progress, SATCOM in progress) etc whereas maintenance reports only go by a error code.Time in transmission, only a couple of seconds. 4 minutes of ACARS transmission would almost need a lot of status/failure messages to have been generated simultaneously---signature electrical surge behavior...Saying all this, still not good enough reason to bring an airplane down...