Race conditions occur when the outcome of a program depends on the timing or sequence of asynchronous operations, leading to unpredictable and often incorrect results. In TypeScript, race conditions typically arise when multiple asynchronous tasks try to access or modify shared resources concurrently. To avoid this, you can use locking mechanisms like mutexes (mutual exclusion), which ensure that only one task can access the resource at a time. Libraries like `async-mutex` provide easy-to-use locks in JavaScript/TypeScript. Another approach is to use semaphores, which limit the number of tasks accessing a resource concurrently. For atomic operations, you can leverage the `Atomics` API in Node.js, which provides low-level tools for safe concurrency. In some cases, restructuring your code to avoid shared state altogether—by using message-passing or event-driven architectures—can eliminate the risk of race conditions. Learning how to handle race conditions is crucial for writing reliable concurrent applications, especially when dealing with async/await or Promises in TypeScript.