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NASA Before diving into how solar storms affect technology, you first have to understand the geomagnetic basics. Once a solar storm reaches the protective magnetic region of the Earth's atmosphere, known as the magnetosphere, its charged particles temporarily change the atomic and magnetic makeup of the Earth's atmosphere, disturbing its magnetic fields, currents and plasma. Like the solar events themselves, these disturbances can be divided into three broad categories. Coronal mass ejections, for example, can cause geomagnetic storms which send geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) through