incident

An incident is any event or occurrence that disrupts, or has the potential to disrupt, normal operations, safety, or security. The term is used across many fields and can describe minor mishaps as well as significant events, including outages, breaches, accidents, or disruptions.

In safety and risk management, incidents are typically recorded and investigated to prevent recurrence. A near miss is an incident that could have caused harm but did not. An accident refers to an unintentional event that causes injury or damage; incident is a broader term that can include accidents, as well as intentional disruptions or benign events.

In information technology, incident management aims to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible, differentiating incidents from problems that require root-cause analysis. In emergency-response and public-safety contexts, organizations use incident command structures to coordinate responders and resources. In law enforcement and journalism, an incident denotes a discrete event that may be reported, investigated, or acted upon.

Etymology: The word incident comes from Latin incident-, from incidere "to happen, befall." In English it has been used since the early modern period to describe events, occurrences, or episodes that are noteworthy or require attention.

See also: incident report, incident management, incident command system, near miss, breach, outage.