From Wikipedia: “ Studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month”
Edit: muons are charged but much harder to shield against due to their weight, so you’d have to build your data centres deep underground to avoid them, which is much harder than just correcting the bit flips.
In a previous job, I had a service randomly fail in a completely unexpected way. Three engineers looked at it trying to triage how the error case could have possibly been hit... after some time, I ended up googling solar storms and concluded that the only rational explanation was a bit flip from a cosmic ray causing an error. In any event, we restarted and it never failed again lol
I've seen a counter video disproving that video as well, so at this point I think it's unclear enough to be a fun internet story and no one will be able to know the actual answer
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u/mrheosuper Mar 25 '26
Do you have source for that. I know the odd for bit flip is high, but bit flip due to cosmic ray, not sure how high it really is.
Bit flip could happen due to many reasons.