Cosmic Radiation

[MixMasterTang]

So we had a Cisco router mysteriously reboot itself last night at 4:30am, so someone here at the office was looking into it and google searched the error reported from the router. On Cisco's website they list a possible cause of this error as

"These errors occur when an energy level within the chip (for example, a one or a zero) changes, most often due to cosmic radiation."

Interestingly enough if you go to the Space Weather website and and view the archives for August 17th it says that "A coronal mass ejection (CME, movie) is heading toward Earth and could spark a geomagnetic storm when it arrives on August 18th or 19th"

This is the link to the cisco article with the above mention of cosmic radiation.


Crazy stuff, we also had some other reports of server issues right around the same time frame at 4:30am CST in our datacenter.

 

[Heisenberg]

Yeah, cosmic rays can cause bit flipping in memory. Also, every time you turn on a fluorescent light, a cosmic ray is what actually starts the electron cascade and makes it light up.

 

[Fritzo]

That's why I make little tinfoil hats to place on all of my routers.

 

[Scrooge2]

lol, it sounds funny but its true. I used to work in a physics lab, and we had a machine that would detect certain kinds of cosmic radiation. It would flicker on all the time. You'd be surprised how usual this is.