MCP servers can silently fail due to unhandled exceptions. The Model Context Protocol specification does not mandate error handling, and reference implementations are minimal. This can lead to servers becoming unresponsive over time without any visible error messages. Common causes include network issues, malformed tool arguments, or external API timeouts.A robust solution involves wrapping tool handlers in a try-except block. This wrapper catches various exceptions, such as ConnectionError, TimeoutError, and ValueError. For network-level issues, the server should attempt to reconnect the transport layer. Invalid arguments from the client should be clearly communicated back.A general Exception catch-all should log the full traceback and return a descriptive error message. Crucially, the response must set isError: True to signal to the client that an error occurred. Without this flag, the AI might interpret error messages as valid results.This wrapper pattern ensures no silent crashes, provides clear error signals to the client, and keeps the server operational. It's important to distinguish between transient errors that should be caught and fatal errors that should crash the server. For servers with shared state, a health check tool can verify the server's integrity after a reconnect.Partial failures are possible and should be handled explicitly by returning partial data along with an error flag. Effective logging, particularly structured JSON logging, is vital for debugging and identifying patterns in errors. This approach has significantly reduced silent failures in production environments.