The developers are meeting you halfway. They told you something went wrong, They have the stack trace in the logs.

Being a reasonably knowledgeable individual you could make use of the deeper information at least scratch your itch for what happened, in the end there’s nothing you can do about it there’s a back end problem. But giving that more detailed information to the end user is a fool’s errand.

Let’s say we pick a simple one, the database connector is down. End user gets a message that the database is unconnectable. Forum start to light up with worries of people losing data. Armchair conjecture about backups and data loss and updates abound.

Realistically the VM host at Amazon had a critical update and got updated, but failed to come back up as they do occasionally and someone needs to go and stop and start the instance to get the database online on new hardware. It only takes 15 or 20 minutes.

Now you’ve got thousands of people in your forum pissed off about something that is only mostly out of your control.

Now let’s replace that error with oops something went wrong.

The people on the forms mention that it’s down they ponder about what could possibly be wrong, But without anything to go on it fizzles away, The site comes back up and people just chalk it up to regular internet shenanigans.

The company didn’t get any benefit from giving the end user more information. Your average user just got their knickers and a twist. And a handful of knowledgeable professionals went wow that sucks sorry guys.