Redpanda

This release fixes several crash bugs (large segment counts during partition removal, disk-full snapshot writes, a SASL connection race) and a security vulnerability (CVE-2026-33630, a double-free/use-after-free in c-ares query completion), plus an rpk connect upgrade detection bug for multi-digit version segments; however, 26.1.16 itself has a critical bug affecting long-running cluster stability and must not be installed.

Matters for: Operators running long-lived, high-availability Redpanda clusters in production and teams using rpk connect to manage Redpanda Connect installations.