Glitch

A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, although it is applied to all types of systems including human organizations.

In electronics, a glitch is an electrical pulse of short duration that is usually the result of a fault or design error, particularly in a digital circuit. For example, many electronic components such as flip-flops are triggered by a pulse that must not be shorter than a specified minimum duration, otherwise the component may malfunction. A pulse shorter than the specified minimum is called a glitch. A related concept is the runt pulse, a pulse whose amplitude is smaller than the minimum level specified for correct operation, and a spike, a short pulse similar to glitch but often caused by ringing or crosstalk.

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In music, glitch refers to a genre of electronic music that became popular in the late 1990s with the increasing use of digital signal processing, particularly on computers.