Taggart Nov 19

Buried in this nicely-detailed RCA is a pretty damning fact:

Cloudflare left .unwrap() in mission-critical Rust code.

For non-Rustaceans, .unwrap() handles a type called Result that can either be Ok with a value, or an Err with an Error. The whole point is to gracefully handle errors and not let panics make it to production code. But unwrap() assumes there's a value to extract without safeguards.

I use .unwrap() sometimes! Usually when there's a logical guarantee that the result can never be an error. But I make sure to purge it from critical processes for exactly this reason.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

Show threadCounterVariableNov 19
@mttaggart ROFL, it looks like they had a return type and everything.
Show threadTaggart 
@counterVariable append_with_names() almost certainly returned a Response. But fetch_features() returned a unit type. Not great.
Nov 19 at 2:33amWeb
Show threadCounterVariableNov 22
@mttaggart I didn't mean to laugh at their expense. I don't think I would be immune to this either. These mistakes happen, it seems like an easy fix at least. It definitely reinforces the idea that unwraps are essentially trip mines in a codebase that will bring your entire system down.