A Mozilla engineer has shared survey data and calculations suggesting that up to 15% of Firefox crashes are due to a bit flip. For the purposes of this report, a bit flip occurs when a memory cell (RAM, cache, etc) updates its value from 0 to 1, or vice-versa, following some unintentional external input. The most common triggers for bit flips are thought to be electrical issues and instability, thermal effects, underlying manufacturing defects and aging, crosstalk, and even memory cells being flipped by an ionizing cosmic ray.
No one seems to have a hard figure for the biggest bit flip contributor. However, systems sent to space will use specialized components hardened to resist interference from cosmic radiation, extremes of temperature, etc, and to include aggressive error checking.
