Imac had to restart

I was using my imac and all of a sudden the screen started shading from the top down and there was a message in a box in the middle of the screen saying my mac had to be restarted by pressing the power button for a few seconds or by hitting the reset button. The message was in like 4 languages.
the only thing I could do was to hold the power button to turn it off. Any idea what this was, I have never seen it before.
Thanks, Chris

It's called a kernel panic - a very low level crash that locked up the computer.
They shouldn't happen at all, but this is the real world we live in.
Tracking the source after the event is tricky.
My advice is to move on, but be aware of it. It it happens again try to note what the machine was doing at the time (e.g. what applications were running, what you were doing, etc.) and whether there's a common series of events that lead up to it.

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