A memory leak occurs when the garbage collector could not collect the objects any longer being used/referenced by an application. If the objects are not garbage collected, the application uses more memory and, once the entire heap is full, the object cannot be allocated, which leads to OutOfMemoryError.

Heap memory has two types of objects—referenced objects and unreferenced objects. The garbage collector will remove all unreferenced objects. However, the garbage collector would not be able to remove referenced objects even though they aren't used by the application.