LogFAQs > #958943971

Yes, solar flares happen all the time, including those that hit Earth. The intensity varies quite a bit. It's not that unusual for there to be flares strong enough that somebody somewhere is affected in some way. Communication errors with satellites are a good possibility. Probably that's about all we'll see here.

But it is possible for them to be strong enough to be significantly disruptive, and if that happened there's not much you can do about it. The strongest one in modern history was in 1859, right at the beginning of the electric era, and it fried a bunch of telegraph lines. If something like that happened today, the damage would be extremely costly. And it was only 150 years ago, who knows how often flares like that had been happening before that? A really bad flare could conceivably fry a good portion of the world's microprocessors, bricking cars and trucks and crashing planes, cause long-lasting blackouts, etc.