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Hotfix
An urgent patch applied directly to a released version to repair a critical defect, bypassing the normal release cadence. A hotfix branches from the production tag rather than from in-progress development, ships the minimal change needed to stop the bleeding, and is then merged back so the fix isn't lost when the next planned release goes out.
The danger with hotfixes is the merge-back step: a fix applied to production but never folded into the mainline silently reappears as a regression in the next release. Disciplined teams treat the hotfix branch as a first-class flow (gitflow formalises it) and gate it the same way as any release — minimal, tested, and reconciled.