I know that cold can as well but heat does it much more easily. Why is it that heat does and not cold?
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Heat is thermal energy and most metals can only take so much heat before they lose structural integrity. Melt, in other words.
Most electronics rely on incredibly bits of metal that are packed in close proximity to each other. Too much heat and those bits of metal melt into each other.
One of the easiest ways to create heat (if you have plenty of electricity) is running electricity through thin wires. Really, it’s the other way around; running electricity through thin wires always generates heat. The thinner the wire, the greater the temperature.
Electronics rely on a huge amount of tiny pieces of semi-metal (silicon) and running electricity through these pieces while relying on their semi-metal properties (transistors and semiconductors).
These two facts mean that electronics are always generating heat, and the heat can break the wires and the semiconductors that are necessary for the electronic to work. Often times there’s a thermometer and programming that just turns the electronic off, but sometimes the semiconductors stop semiconducting when they get too hot, and other times the thin wires melt or set things on fire. The first two can see the electronic working again once it cools down; melted wires and burnt plastic usually permanently breaks the electronic.
So the reason heat breaks electronics and cold usually doesn’t is because the electronics are creating heat anyway, so cold is countered by default.
Because the processes that result in breakage require energy to make changes in the materials. Heat provides that energy. Most chemical and physical reactions are accelerated by thermal energy. There’s even a semi-famous [equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenius_equation) that describes how much.
In things like semiconductors, heat can also create a positive feedback effect. (Unlike in psychology, in engineering positive feedback usually isn’t a good thing.) Hotter transistors can “leak” more current than usual, and that can create more heat, which creates more leakage, etc. etc. This can lead to thermal runaway, which is often catastrophic.
With all that said, there are actually a small number of failure mechanisms that get worse at *colder* temperatures, and an even smaller number that are worse at intermediate temperatures. Those are usually the result of multiple different things occurring in conjunction.
*Source: I’m a former reliability engineer.*
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