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/

@mttaggart so it's basically like "try" or "catch unreachable" in zig

evil.

@nelson @mttaggart closer to `catch unreachable` I think. My understanding is `try` is like rusts `? ` operator which returns an error if the proceeding expression evaluates to one
@fl0und3r @mttaggart ooo, i don’t know much about rust, thanks!