Crash
An abnormal process termination caused by an unrecoverable fault or forced termination, rather than a clean, intentional exit.
Definition
A crash is an abnormal end of a running process. The process did not complete its intended “clean exit” path.
Crashes can be caused by faults (invalid memory access, aborts, fatal runtime errors) or by abrupt termination from outside the process.
What crashes imply
Crashes usually imply:
- in-memory state is lost
- in-flight work may be interrupted
- cleanup might not run (unless handled separately)
That’s why crash behavior differs from graceful shutdown.