Glitch

Alex Pieschel, writing for Arcade Review, said: "'bug' is often cast as the weightier and more blameworthy pejorative, while 'glitch' suggests something more mysterious and unknowable inflicted by surprise inputs or stuff outside the realm of code".

It was first widely defined for the American people by Bennett Cerf on the June 20, 1965, episode of What's My Line as "a kink ... when anything goes wrong down there [Cape Kennedy], they say there's been a slight glitch".

[3] John Daly further defined the word on the July 4, 1965, episode of What's My Line, saying that it's a term used by the Air Force at Cape Kennedy, in the process of launching rockets, "it means something's gone wrong and you can't figure out what it is so you call it a 'glitch'".

In relation to the reference by Time, the term has been believed to enter common usage during the American Space Race of the 1950s, where it was used to describe minor faults in the rocket hardware that were difficult to pinpoint.

According to a Wall Street Journal article written by Ben Zimmer,[6] The Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro came up with the new earliest use of the word yet found: May 19, 1940.

The April 11, 1943, issue of The Washington Post carried a review of Helen Sioussat's book about radio broadcasting, Mikes Don't Bite.

Generally, this implies an electrical pulse of short duration, often due to a race condition between two signals derived from a common source but with different delays.

Examples of computer glitches causing disruption include an unexpected shutdown of a water filtration plant in New Canaan, 2010,[7] failures in the Computer Aided Dispatch system used by the police in Austin, resulting in unresponded 911 calls,[8] and an unexpected bit flip causing the Cassini spacecraft to enter "safe mode" in November 2010.

[9] Glitches can also be costly: in 2015, a bank was unable to raise interest rates for weeks resulting in losses of more than a million dollars per day.

Quality assurance (QA) testers are commonly employed throughout the development process to find and report glitches to the programmers to be fixed, then potentially start over with a new build of the game.

[16] In broadcasting, a corrupted signal may glitch in the form of jagged lines on the screen, misplaced squares, static looking effects, freezing problems, or inverted colors.

These glitches may be caused by a variety of issues, interference from portable electronics or microwaves, damaged cables at the broadcasting center, or weather.