Glitch

[from German 'glitschen' to slip, via Yiddish 'glitshen', to slide or skid]

1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in electric service is specifically called a 'power glitch'. This is of grave concern because it usually crashes all the computers. In jargon, though, a hacker who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he or she intended to complete it might say,

"Sorry, I just glitched".

2. vi. To commit a glitch.

See gritch.

3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen, esp. several lines at a time. WAITS terminals used to do this in order to avoid continuous scrolling, which is distracting to the eye.

4. obs. Same as magic cookie, sense 2.

All these uses of 'glitch' derive from the specific technical meaning the term has to hardware people. If the inputs of a circuit change, and the outputs change to some {random} value for some very brief time before they settle down to the correct value, then that is called a glitch. This may or may not be harmful, depending on what the circuit is connected to. This term is techspeak, found in electronics texts.