> even if there is no reason to actually believe that the bitflip was due to cosmic rays.

What if there is reason to consider it as it is actually a known, proven, observable phenomenon, especially one with greater likelihood/intensity as you climb in altitude, like planes do, and that likelihood/intensity also scales with solar cycle intensity, which we are currently experiencing the peak of?

Or perhaps you think the Aurora Borealis are because of Aliens too?

> I feel like using "Cosmic Rays" as a reason is equivalent to "Aliens".

This is actually a thing. Cisco had issues with cosmic radiation in some of their equipment a few years back. Same symptoms: random memory corruption, and when they would test the memory everything would check out, but once in a blue moon, the routers would behave erratically.

When you do Raman spectroscopy in a lab the software literally has an automatic cosmic ray rejection mode because for autonomy you are very likely to get cosmic ray initiated return signals over the course of a couple of hours.

"If the signal looks amazingly strong but unexpected and sharp, it's probably a cosmic ray" was what I was trained for.

Thank you for bringing reason to this topic where everyone is losing their mind when it comes up. Cosmic rays are sexy, They're sciency, but they're not a good explanation when you actually run the math.

Random but flips are pretty much always bad hardware. That's what the literature says when you actually study it. And that's also what we find at work: we wrote a program that occupied most of the free ram and checked it for bit flips. Deployed on a sizeable fleet of machines. We found exactly that: yes there were bit flips, but they were highly concentrated on specific machines and disappeared after changing hardware.

What evidence do you have that this wasn’t due to solar radiation?