A mess — a plan that has gone wrong because of confusion, a mistake, or bad organisation. A computer snafu stops the payments going out; a scheduling snafu puts two meetings in the same room. Informal, and much more common in American English. Two things are worth knowing about how it feels. It points at muddle rather than disaster: a snafu is annoying and embarrassing, something you have to sort out, not a tragedy. And it usually blames a system, not a person — offices, airlines, governments, and computers have snafus. Newspapers like it because it is short and fits a headline. You will hear "a bit of a snafu", "the whole thing was a snafu", "after last week's snafu". The word began as army slang in the Second World War, made from the first letters of "situation normal, all fucked up" — a soldier's joke that being in a mess IS the normal state of things. Most people who use it today have no idea about that, and it is now mild enough for the news, though the origin means some older speakers still hear something rude in it.