This from "The Register" piece:
The infamous Heartbleed flaw in the OpenSSL cryptographic library was the result of a memory safety error (an out-of-bounds read) in C code. And there are many other examples, including the mid-June Google Cloud outage, which Google's incident report attributes to a lack of proper error handling for a null pointer.
Within a few years, the tech industry began answering the call for memory-safe languages. In 2022, Microsoft executives began calling for new applications to be written in memory-safe languages like Rust.
General purpose memory safe languages have been around for a long time, for example Ada (1983) or Eiffel (1986). They just haven't been very popular, because they tend to require programmers to think harder. But software development is an industry that has a very short memory, and generally doesn't show much interest in techniques that produce better, as opposed to faster, software development. I guess it only counts if Microsoft or Google recognizes a technology as legitimate.