Yes, it's absolutely better to crash if you're in an unexpected state. I had to deal with a service once which had a top-level exception handler that ensured th

Yes, it's absolutely better to crash if you're in an unexpected state. I had to deal with a service once which had a top-level exception handler that ensured that all exceptions would simply log and let the service keep running. That's great for the majority of exceptions which reach that point because most of them are no big deal to push through. But one time an exception came at just the right time to cause the internal state and database state to be out of sync. That caused data updates in the service from that point on to start saving bad data into the database. It took a few hours to notice the issue and by that point a lot of the persisted data was trashed. We had to take down the service, restore the database from a backup, and reconstruct the correct data for the entire day. Fortunately the data issues here were low impact, but it could just as easily have been critical data that was bad. And having a business operate on incorrect data like that could cause far bigger issues than a bit of downtime while the service restarts.