Definitely an "oops" moment ! Love it 😀
I tinkered with cloaking in my setting, and then decided that it was likely to be the kind of arms race where detection technology would have the edge - to be fully cloaked, you have to be invisible in all the spectra, while the detectors only have to stumble on the single one where the cloaking has been forgotten or isn't 100%. So I switched to random plane/dimension/time-hopping as more likely to hold up against detection, at least until you get close enough to start trading pot-shots.