While many have nearly lost patience with their smartphones due to frozen screens and cursed Apple, Microsoft, and Google for it, scientists have now revealed that smartphone manufacturers may in fact be blameless as alien subatomic particles from outer space are causing the glitches.

You definitely read that right. Scientists suggest that alien particles are striking our bodies every second and wreaking "low grade havoc" on computers, and smartphones on Earth.

Researchers said that the millions of energetic neutrons, muons, pions, and alpha particles raining down from space could carry energy that affects the memory of gadgets, intercepting the data stored and thus causing the phones to freeze.

"The semiconductor manufacturers are very concerned about this problem because it is getting more serious as the size of the transistors in computer chips shrink and the power and capacity of our digital systems increase," Professor Bharat Bhuva of Vanderbilt University in the US said.

But, in a more critical note, the particles also seem to mess up with airplane computers and even the voting system.

For instance, the avionics system of a Qantus passenger jet flying from Singapore to Perth in 2008 suffered from a single-event upset (SEU or bit flip) that caused the autopilot to disengage. This caused the plane to dive 690 feet in merely 23 seconds, injuring nearly a third of its passengers.

A bit flip also caused an electronic voting machine to add 4,096 extra votes to one candidate during the 2003 election in the Belgian town of Schaerbeek. The glitch was traced after the error gave the candidate more votes than were possible, and it was found to have been caused by a single bit flip in the machine's register.

"This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public," Bhuva said.

Although this subatomic torrent has no known harmful effects on human health, its ability to interfere with operation of microelectronic circuitry could pose some serious safety risks.