A Carrington Event would definitely impact the power lines and likely cause widespread power outages, and perhaps even failure of the US grid power for a substantial period of time. In addition to the power outage and other impacts on infrastructure, there would be voltage transients that could be hard to handle. A lot of well designed electronics have some type of protection, but not all. In some cases, electrostatic discharge would also cause device failures. Such an event would impact satellites, perhaps knocking them some out, but maybe not as obvious is that the ionosphere will be disturbed and radio communications will be impacted. Scintillations in the ionosphere will make GPS less precise. Airlines that fly over the poles actually get space weather reports to help better understand radio and navigation problems caused by space weather. So something like a Carrington event would cause problems, but probably wipe out everything.
Radiation on the other hand, assuming it is not too detrimental to your people, plants etc. Is something that can cause electronics reliability problems.
A lot of modern electronics are based on field effect transistors or CMOS device, and they are essentially electrostatic devices where a small voltage on the "gate" will allow the current to flow from the "source" to the "drain". If there is some extra charge somewhere near the gate, the amount of voltage to control the device changes.
So when a particle goes though the semiconductor it knocks electrons off the atoms leaving an ionization trail. These extra electrons if near the gate can cause the device to fail. Other things can happen too like blowing a hole in the gate, or creating defects by knocking atoms around etc. There are a bunch of people who work on radiation hardened electronics to try to get around these types of problems.
A lot of the failures in electronics from radiation are from cosmic rays, or from particles from the sun. The ones from cosmic rays are interesting since they can come from beyond the solar system, and there are cosmic ray showers of energetic particles when a cosmic ray hits the atmosphere.
So on the surface of the planet, I suppose you could have a couple of choices. Some galactic source pulses every decade or so and zaps your electronics. Or perhaps there is flare where in addition to the geomagnetic induction of voltage on the wires, there is enough radiation that makes it through the protective aspects of the earths magnetic field. Or perhaps you could hand wave and have the magnetic field have a glitch or flip directions and the radiation zaps the electronics. Maybe the people, plants and animals have evolved to have to had some tolerance for the radiation, or along with your electronics having problems, there is an increased risk for cancer. For electronics, especially computation pretty much every thing has to work perfectly, for people and animals, people get x-rays, sunburns, or live at high altitudes, smoke etc. so in someways are more tolerant of radiation.
Instead of Silicon and other types of semiconductor transistors, you can have vacuum tubes, or microfluidic devices that are more tolerant of radiation. But building a computer, or some other types of electronic devices would be a lot harder, and often not very small.
Edited to add link to NASA Article on the Carrington Event of 1859, the massive solar storm that allowed people to see Aurora Borealis as far south as the Caribbean and allowed telegraph operators in Boston to operate the systems with the batteries unplugged. (It also caused fires at numerous telegraph stations. It is expected that such an event would cause major disruptions if it occurred today.
