An Error Occurred

I’ve been working with computer systems for about a decade now, maybe more, if you count my early childhood tinkerings. One thing thats been nagging me about recent events is the lack of descriptive error messages. I’m not sure if its complicated, a method of security obfuscation, or just plain laziness, but to me its starting to get out of hand. What I keep seeing, even in Windows 11: An Error Occurred, or Something went wrong, or Something happened on our end. Who does that help? It doesn’t help the regular person, who know believes they didn’t do something wrong (most of the time its not Microsofts issue, but a connection issue).

One issue I experienced recently was attempting to logging into a Microsoft game that would would error with the inevitable “Something went wrong on our end” error. Found out it was because I had to sign out of Word and sign back in on Word with the account I was trying to sign into the game with, then I could sign into the game with the account I wanted to sign in.

My most recent experience with these errors is a loading screen that would inevitably crash, but there is no access to logs to find out why, theres no real recourse but to reinstall the app and hope it works, or Google to find some obscure way to fix the issue.

Please bring back the old days where there was some information on the screen when loading, it makes it less pretty but easier to troubleshoot issues when they inevitably happen.