Other forms: disrupted, disrupting, disrupts
To disrupt is to break the normal flow of things. Disrupt the service, disrupt a meeting, badly disrupted.
It means interrupting a process so that it cannot continue as before — disrupted travel, disrupted supply. In business writing it has a second and more admiring sense taken from Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive innovation, where a cheaper simpler product displaces an established one; the word has since been used so loosely that the original meaning is nearly lost. Note disruption, disruptive.
1verbdisruptTo break the normal flow of things.
“The strike disrupted train services across the country for three days.”
disrupt is a breaking of flow.
Latin disrumpere is dis-, apart, plus rumpere, to break. Rupture, erupt and bankrupt come from the same breaking.
Proto-Indo-European
*Hrewp-
Latin
disruptus
English, today
disrupt
Built from
Latin disruptus, from disrumpo, commonly dirumpo (“to break or burst asunder”), from dis-, di- (“apart, asunder”) + rumpo (“to break”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA