drop-outs n.

1. A variety of `power glitch' (see glitch); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains. 2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts; see screaming tty). 3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See glitch, fried.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.