We're constantly being bombarded by gamma rays from outer space. Sometimes this causes "bit flips," where a bit inside a computer switches from 0 to 1—and causes an election to go wrong, or a plane to crash.
Back in 2003, Belgium was holding a national election. One of their first where the votes would be cast and counted on computers. Thousands of hours of preparation went into making it unhackable. And when the day of the vote came, everything seemed to have gone well. That was, until a cosmic chain of events caused a single bit to flip and called the outcome into question.
A very good recent episode from Radiolab.
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