Hotfix is an urgent patch applied directly to production without going through the normal development cycle. It bypasses QA and review because the system is broken and every minute matters.

Critical bugs in production (security exploits, data loss, crashes) cannot wait for the next scheduled release. Waiting hours or days for a normal release cycle means more users affected and more revenue lost.

The fix is made on a branch from the release branch, tested minimally, deployed to production, then merged back to main. The key discipline is always merging the fix back to main, otherwise it silently disappears in the next release. If hotfixes are frequent, the real problem is the CI/CD pipeline or testing practices, not the release process.

The diagram shows the fast path: hotfix branches from release, deploys in minutes, then must merge back to main to avoid losing the fix.

main:    o---o---o (development continues)
release: o-------o---o (v1.0 in production)
         |       ^   \
         |       |    o---o (hotfix branch, urgent patch)
         |       |         |
         |       +---deployed to prod
         |           (5 minutes vs 2 hours for normal release)
         |
         +---merge hotfix back after deploy (CRITICAL)