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?

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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.