According to a Cal Berkeley physicist, we missed getting blasted back into the Stone Age by a grid-destorying coronal mass ejection in 2013 in this article. Actually, the plural is used in the Reuters article, so I guess we dodged a number of bullets. Similar in magnitude to the 1859 Carrington event, for those familiar with the history of CME's.

I don't know what to say to that. I mean, we almost lost basically ALL electronics and electrical power? I don't know how close (and I mean "close" in the astronomical scale) we came to being hit by a powerful CME, but it's still chilling.