Which of the following best describes memory leaks?

Memory leaks occur when a program allocates memory but fails to release it back to the system after it is no longer needed. Over time, this can lead to a situation where the amount of available memory is reduced, negatively impacting system performance. As memory leaks accumulate, they can exhaust the available memory resources, leading to slowdowns, crashes, or even system failures, particularly in long-running applications.

The other options present misunderstandings of what memory leaks are. For instance, while some issues may resolve on their own in certain contexts, memory leaks do not fix themselves; they require intervention to properly free up memory. Memory leaks can occur in both high-level and low-level programming languages, not being exclusive to high-level languages. Lastly, equating memory leaks with normal memory usage is misleading; normal usage involves the proper management of allocated memory, while memory leaks represent a failure in that management process.