Serious Computer Glitches Can Be Caused By Cosmic Rays (computerworld.com)

The Los Alamos National Lab wrote in 2012 that "For over 20 years the military, the commercial aerospace industry, and the computer industry have known that high-energy neutrons streaming through our atmosphere can cause computer errors." Now an anonymous reader quotes Computerworld: When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don't be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays -- or rather the electrically charged particles they generate -- may be your real foe. While harmless to living organisms, a small number of these particles have enough energy to interfere with the operation of the microelectronic circuitry in our personal devices... particles alter an individual bit of data stored in a chip's memory. Consequences can be as trivial as altering a single pixel in a photograph or as serious as bringing down a passenger jet.

A "single-event upset" was also blamed for an electronic voting error in Schaerbeekm, Belgium, back in 2003. A bit flip in the electronic voting machine added 4,096 extra votes to one candidate. The issue was noticed only because the machine gave the candidate more votes than were possible. "This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public," said Bharat Bhuva. Bhuva is a member of Vanderbilt University's Radiation Effects Research Group, established in 1987 to study the effects of radiation on electronic systems.
Cisco has been researching cosmic radiation since 2001, and in September briefly cited cosmic rays as a possible explanation for partial data losses that customer's were experiencing with their ASR 9000 routers.

Comments

That is why Excel crashes all the time on OSX

[thesjaakspoiler]

I was convinced that is was a lousy programming job by Microsoft that has more attention to fancy UX components rather than stability. I am waiting for the confirmation that the fact that Excel start searching every known (network) drive for a license if it can't connect to the online subscription service, for every operation, must be due to black matter. Unless it crashes when it tries to display that warning message, then it's just some cosmic ray again. So relieved!

ECC

[Bruce Perens]

This is why ECC is used to protect memory and data busses. At least on the good stuff :-) . One of the issues is die shrink. As the minimum detail slze of the IC process gets smaller, the potential for radiation to flip a bit gets higher.

Silicon-on-sapphire is the main way to implement silicon-on-insulator, which is more protective of radiation bit flips and less likely to latch-up. But since these have historically been required only for space satellites, they have been horribly expensive. Imagine running an entire IC fabrication just to make a few chips. As there are more applications for rad-hard chips, the price could fall.

Re:Why not blame the manufacturer?

[DontBeAMoran]

There's something you can do about it. It's very easy, but you won't like it.

Make every component in triplicate. Everything in the CPU, everything in the RAM, everything in storage, etc. If the three aren't equal, go with the value shared by two of them and rewrite the different one with that value.

Odds

[JBMcB]

The odds of a cosmic ray hitting your memory at the exact right spot to flip a bit are one in hundreds of millions. There are just enough computers out there that it happens from time to time. The odds of FIVE rays hitting just the right locations to flip four bits and a parity bit are, pardon the pun, astronomical.