Embodiments of the invention provide an interrupt handler configured to distinguish between critical and non-critical unrecoverable memory errors, yielding different actions for each. Doing so may allow a system to recover from certain memory errors without having to terminate a running process. In addition, when an operating system critical task experiences an unrecoverable error, such a task may be acting on behalf of a non-critical process (e.g., when swapping out a virtual memory page). When this occurs, an interrupt handler may respond to a memory error with the same response that would result had the process itself performed the memory operation. Further, firmware may be configured to perform diagnostics to identify potential memory errors and alert the operating system before a memory region state change occurs, such that the memory error would become critical.