What is System Crash & What Caused my Mac to Crash?

My MacBook Pro repeatedly restarted by itself. After surveying, I knew that it was experiencing a system crash. What is a system crash? What caused my Mac to crash? I’m tired of my MacBook Pro keeps crashing and restarting, how can I stop this? I worry that my MacBook Pro won’t open anymore after a future system crash.

A system crash refers to the critical errors occurring in the operating system that disrupt its normal functioning and make it cannot recover from, resulting in the system freezing, becoming unresponsive, or restarting unexpectedly.

The system crash can be regarded as a software glitch and the symptom of it is that the Mac computer keeps restarting.

What a complex issue. The reasons that cause your Mac to crash are hard to say because the possible reasons are diverse. I summarized the common causes below for your reference:

Kernel panic. The macOS kernel (the core part of the operating system) has an error that forces the system to shut down or restart. In this case, your Mac will usually show a black screen with a message saying “Your computer restarted because of a problem.”

Application failure. If a certain application crashes due to bugs, compatibility issues, conflicts, or corrupt preference files, it might cause the entire system to become unresponsive or frozen.

Hardware glitches: Issues with the computer’s hardware, such as faulty RAM, a failing hard drive, an outdated driver, overheating, etc., can cause the system to crash.

Corrupted core system files: If some essential system files become corrupted, macOS may fail to perform properly and shut down or keep restarting.

Resource overload: The system memory that the running programs use is far overwhelm the maximum RAM your Mac has. Running too many intensive applications simultaneously will greatly consume the memory on your Mac.

Do you know the reason why does your Mac crash? Since the reasons are diverse, so do the solutions.

Boot your Mac into Safe Mode

Safe Mode is a diagnostic mode in macOS that starts up your Mac only with the necessary system files and drivers while isolating all third-party programs. When you boot your Mac into Safe Mode, your Mac will perform system checks.

Thus, if your Mac won’t experience crashes when in Safe Mode, it indicates that some third-party apps cause the issue. Check the apps you’ve installed, especially those installed recently or not from the App Store. Uninstall them usually can block your Mac from crashing.

Run Apple Diagnostics to check the hardware

Apple Diagnostics is a check mode that can help you find the hardware causing your MacBook to keep crashing. That’s because hardware faulty is also one of the main reasons that make a system crash.

  1. Disconnect all external peripherals except the power supply.

  2. Reboot your Mac and meanwhile press down the D key until the Apple Diagnostics screen appears.

  3. Wait for Apple Diagnostics to check the hardware of your Mac.

  4. Browse the results and refer to the Apple Diagnostics reference codes to find the culprit.

If the above two ways do not work, you can also try to reset NVRAM and SMC and update Mac to fix this issue. I’ve fixed this problem via NVRAM and SMC resetting.

Got that. It seems just a system issue and can be fixed. Only sounds so scared.

It is probably because of the game software that I installed by my friend.

Uninstalled the recently installed application and the issue was fixed, thanks!