When using the internet for work, shopping or gaming nothing is more frustrating than an outage or error that puts a halt to your browsing.
Different faults and outages can turn off different websites, and usually, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.
One of the most common errors you may see when facing a web outage is a 500 internal server error. But what is it and can it be resolved?
READ MORE: Is Cloudflare down? Problems causing widespread internet outage
What does 500 internal server error mean?
A 500 internal server error generally means that your server is unable to load a website and has come into a problem but can’t seem to source what the problem is.
According to How-To Geek, this means there is a problem with the website you are trying to visit instead of your own internet, computer or browser.
It goes on to explain that this message will appear, in varying similar formats, “when something unexpected happened on the web server and the server can’t offer more specific information.”
How to fix a 500 internal server error
As this is an issue with the site itself and not your browser etc, there’s sadly not much you can do until whoever runs the website fixes the issue.
However, occasionally the error is a one-off and could be fixed quickly. Refreshing the page may bring you back to your search.
Otherwise, you should wait some time and try again to see if the website error has been fixed.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
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