The Sun aims a storm right at Earth: expect aurorae tonight! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.
Mon Jan 23 at 4:00 UTC (or Sun Jan 22 at 8 PM Pacific), there was a pretty spectacular solar flare. For the next several days we’re going to see an upswing in support tickets at work. In the last 48 hours we’ve had a few systems go down, power & environmental problems, UPSs burn out. This evening I worked on a site where a VPN router went down for no apparent reason. (All signs point to the network, but everything else on the network was working and the VPN router is directly connected to the internet… It was very perplexing.)
Whenever I hear about a solar flare, I’m sure there’s going to be more tickets in the work queue. If you read the FCC guidelines carefully (read the label on the box of every piece of electronics sold in the US), it says that all electronic devices must accept interference (even if it may cause undesired operation).
This device complies with part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference that may cause undesired operation.
via http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet61/oet61.pdf
And that’s what a solar flare puts out (large bursts of energy that can caused undesired operations.) In Sweden there were reports of the power grid being affected by the solar flare.
The picture is pretty, but it also means work.
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