Blue Smoke
Noun · Slang & Abbreviations
Definitions
A joking reference to the smoke that supposedly powers hardware and escapes when something catastrophically fails. In computing humor, releasing the blue smoke means the device is probably broken in a dramatic and unrecoverable way.
In plain English: A humorous way to describe catastrophic hardware failure.
Example: "The lab power board emitted blue smoke during the test, which ended the debugging session and answered whether that voltage assumption had been safe."