With an increasing number of storeys, timber buildings require closer attention to structuralrobustness. If a building can survive unforeseen events (e.g. accidents, terrorism), lives can be saved.The literature appears to be rather limited concerning robustness of timber buildings. This paperaims to give a brief review on robustness in general and design guidelines for timber in specific. Theresults indicate that connection design is a key aspect for robustness. Like in seismic design, by usingthe ductile capacity of connectors, the brittleness of timber can be controlled. For light timber-framebuildings, more guidelines exist than for posts and beams and cross-laminated timber, which bothseem to be similar to steel frames and precast concrete respectively regarding robustness.