The branch history was perfect until it wasn’t. One rebase, a missed flag, and the commit graph turned into a maze. You thought you could undo it in seconds. Instead, every change set seemed tangled, every merge base uncertain, and the only thing moving fast was the damage.
Git rebase is powerful. It rewrites history. It cleans up messy commits. It sharpens the story of your code. But when that rewrite goes wrong, the fallout can break more than a branch—it can disrupt delivery, block teammates, and hide critical changes.
Incident response for a rebase failure has one goal: recover the correct state without losing work. The first step is to stop all pushes to the shared branch. Freeze the damage. Then capture the current HEAD SHA, stash local changes, and switch to a safe branch. This snapshot ensures you have a recovery point if later steps go sideways.
Inspect the reflog. The reflog is the record of every move you’ve made. Find the SHA before the rebase began. That commit becomes your anchor. From here, you can cherry-pick good changes back in or reset hard to the anchor, depending on what must be saved and what can be discarded.