A Cisco bug report addressing “partial data traffic loss” on the company’s ASR 9000 Series routers contends that a “possible trigger is cosmic radiation causing SEU soft errors.”

Cosmic radiation? While we all know that cosmic radiation can wreak havoc on electronic devices, there’s far less agreement as to the likelihood of it being the culprit in this case. Or that Cisco could know one way or the other.

A reader of Reddit’s section devoted to networking asks the question: “Has anyone ever seen ‘cosmic radiation’ as a cause for software errors in a bug report before? The ‘fix’ is to reload the line card. This did resolve the issue in our case. Anybody else experience this?”

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