Reminds me of a story a very old physics teacher would tell us in HS. A mainframe computer was inexplicably crashing at seemingly random intervals. Turns out the hard drives of that time were not sealed, and the space between the heads and the disk surface was just wide enough for smoke particles to cause an error and crash in certain occasions. Some of the mainframe operators were smoking in the room and causing the crashes.
Not sure if it was just a cool story or a real thing, but based on his other stories it seemed pretty legit.