Synopsis: Typo in .htaccess "Require" causes 500 Server Error State-Changed-From-To: open-closed State-Changed-By: marc State-Changed-When: Sun Aug 24 11:06:28 PDT 1997 State-Changed-Why: Please provide a version when you submit bug reports. The "latest Apache" means nothing.
A 500 server error is not a "crash", it is telling the client that the server is incorrectly configured so it can't serve requests. That is the way it is supposed to work. If you have something unparsable in the .htaccess file, it is better to deny access then to permit access because you could be permitting unwanted access. The error is logged in the error log; it is documented quite clearly that you should look in the error log for errors.
