In computing, a fatal error is an error which causes a program to abort - and thus may return the user to the operating system. When this happens, data that the program was processing may be lost. A fatal error occurs typically in any of these cases:

• An illegal instruction has been attempted
• Invalid data or code has been accessed
• The privilege level of an operation is invalid
• A program attempts to divide by zero. (Only for integers; with the IEEE floating point standard, this creates an infinity instead)

In some systems, such as Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, a fatal error causes the operating system to create a log entry or to save an image (core dump) of the process.

See also

External links

• What Are Fatal Exception Errors - Microsoft Knowledge Base