Electrically charged particles from outer space may be to blame when our electronic devices crash unexpectedly.
According to Bharat Bhuva, a professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University, many unexplained glitches that force a reboot could be the result of electrically charged particles generated by cosmic rays from outside our solar system.
Once the rays reach Earth, they create “cascades of secondary particles including energetic neutrons, muons, pions and alpha particles”, which are powerful and plentiful enough to trigger a glitch in electronics transistors.