"Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100 percent positive that ... a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. That's one crash every twenty potentially caused by bad/flaky memory, it's huge! And because it's a conservative heuristic we're underestimating the real number, it's probably going to be at least twice as much."
"Mozilla received about 470,000 crash reports from Firefox users, which just covers those who opted in to crash reporting. About 25,000, he said, look to be potential bit flips. And, he said, if he subtracts crashes caused by resource exhaustion, like running out of memory, the proportion of crashes attributable to hardware goes up to about 15 percent."
"Bit flips can be caused by a variety of things, such as cosmic rays and Rowhammer attacks. But often the explanation is more mundane - flawed electronic components. Svelto said that, while his research focuses mainly on computers and phones, these issues are present in every device, such as routers and printers."
Mozilla engineer Gabriele Svelto discovered that bit flips—unintentional changes in memory caused by cosmic rays, Rowhammer attacks, or defective electronic components—account for roughly 10-15 percent of Firefox crashes. Analysis of 470,000 weekly crash reports revealed approximately 25,000 potential bit flip incidents, with the actual number likely double that estimate. When excluding resource exhaustion crashes, hardware-related failures reach 15 percent of total crashes. This phenomenon extends beyond computers and phones to routers and printers. Previous research by Google in 2009 similarly revealed DRAM error rates significantly higher than expected, with 8 percent of memory modules experiencing errors annually.
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