At 19:12 UT on March 15, 1989, the sun erupted an X4.5 solar flare, accompanied by a coronal mass ejection event (CME), the shock wave driven by the CME reached the magnetosphere at 01:27 UT on March 13, and the shock wave and the ICME driving the shock wave subsequently triggered a super magnetic storm with a geomagnetic index Dst minimum of - 598nT, which is the most eye-catching magnetic storm event, It is also the most serious event to damage the transmission system.

In the early morning of March 13, in the control room of Quebec Electric Power Company in Montreal, technicians monitored the graph board showing the operation status of the power grid as usual, which supplies power to 6 million residents in Quebec Province. At 2:44 a.m., an indicator light on the drawing board began to flash, indicating that a fault had occurred at the northern end of the grid. Faced with an emergency, the technicians were shocked. Then, the provincial power failure accidents occurred again and again, and the whole power grid completely collapsed in less than 90 seconds. The display board flickers like a Christmas tree, while the whole province of Quebec is dark. The power failure caused the power company to lose 10 million dollars, while the loss of users reached tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Although power supply was restored in most areas within 9 hours, darkness continued for several days in some places. At the same time, the huge transformer of a nuclear power station on the Delaware River in New Jersey, the United States, was also burned, and other power systems in North America were also affected. Five 130kV transmission lines in southern and central Sweden tripped, and the transformers of Tokyo Electric Power Company were destroyed. Ron Zweig, deputy director of the Space Environment Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States, said: "If we can predict the arrival of the solar storm in advance, even one hour, and give a warning, the damage caused by the solar storm will be reduced to the smallest possible."

The induced current generated during the magnetic storm also has a direct impact on the underground oil and gas pipelines. The incident damaged the Australian oil pipeline, and high-voltage pulses appeared on the Atlantic and Pacific submarine cables. In addition, this incident also caused the loss of half of the energy of the solar cell of the United States GOES-7 satellite, thus reducing the life of the satellite by half; The Japanese communication satellite CS-3B is abnormal, and the standby command circuit carried on the spacecraft is damaged; The NASA satellite SMM dropped by 3 km during the whole magnetic disturbance period, thus shortening its life span, and finally burned down in the process of falling into the Earth's atmosphere on December 2, 1989.