On Thu, 18 January 2001, Shawn McMahon wrote:

The primary expected effect of "solarmax" flare activity is that Sean Donelan will have to buy a new keyboard, because he'll wear out his old one.

Solor activity has some affect on the electrical grid and on satellites. However, the folks operating the layer 0 and layer 1 facilities usually do their jobs well enough it rarely has any noticable affect on the upper layers. The most noticible affect for most network operators is they get some extra static or sparkles on their CNN monitor in the NOC.