01
It reproduces
A particle passes once and does not wait for your test suite. If the fault returns on demand it was written by someone, reviewed by someone else, and approved by both.
Every claim that a defect was caused by a cosmic ray is assessed here against the particle flux where the machine was actually standing. The mechanism is real and well measured. Your claim, in all likelihood, is neither.
A cosmic ray striking the upper atmosphere produces a shower of secondary neutrons, and a neutron crossing unprotected memory can deposit enough charge to flip a single bit. Error-correcting memory exists partly for that reason, and partly for the ordinary defects that are far likelier. Enter the conditions and the office will rule.
The surplus was exactly 212: the thirteenth bit, set where it should have been clear. It was detected only because the arithmetic became impossible. The official finding was a spontaneous inversion of that bit. What flipped it was never established, and cosmic radiation was the explanation offered rather than one proved. The office keeps the file permanently on display all the same, on the grounds that it is the closest the excuse has ever come to being true, and because a defect that announces itself in a clean power of two is considerably rarer than the excuse.
A particle passes once and does not wait for your test suite. If the fault returns on demand it was written by someone, reviewed by someone else, and approved by both.
Error-correcting memory catches a single-bit upset and records it. A machine with ECC and an empty log is a machine reporting that nothing arrived.
Large-scale study of memory in service found errors far more common than predicted, and predominantly hard rather than transient: the same cells failing repeatedly. That is a component wearing out, and unlike the sky it can be inspected.