A memory leak is considered a failure or bug within the application/program that holds it. Memory leakage may be intended or unintended by the application/program, which may retain the application in memory to execute operations or remain frozen in an unrecoverable state. The resident program also may source/leak additional memory space without releasing the previously used space, leading to the exhaustion of memory resources and a poorly performing or frozen system.

A memory leak may be mitigated through specialized memory management software or by adding garbage collection functions to the application source code.