A Merge Has Exactly Two Parents. The Line From a Third Branch Took Down Every API Route.
For 17 hours and 55 minutes, every route under /api/* on staging answered with a fatal error. The merge that caused it landed at 17:18 one evening; the fix that ended it landed at 11:13 the next morning. That duration is from the private repository and the server log, so you cannot verify it; read it as my account. The merge itself was ordinary: a feature branch into staging, one conflict, in the file that registers HTTP middleware. The conflict was real, both sides had added a line at the same spot. What went wrong was not the conflict. It was how the conflict was “resolved”, and then how the result was checked and declared fine. ...