Share the Funniest Bug/Error Message You've Seen?

Error: Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue

Stacktrace:
<java.lang.NullPointerException>

This was literally the whole error... someone disabled the full stack-trace and information. It was very hard to debug without enabling that again in production.

This doesn't exactly answer the question, but it's to do with error handling. I once had a colleague who was doing VBA. She named an error handling label in her code hell. So...

If errorCondition Then GoTo hell

(Sorry if that's not valid VBA - I've never written any, but was trying to share the story.)

My browser crashed after an infinite loop in JavaScript. This was the Error:

Maximum update depth exceeded. This can happen when a component repeatedly calls setState inside componentWillUpdate or componentDidUpdate. React limits the number of nested updates to prevent infinite loops.

😁 The funny part was that my browser continued to crash 💥 and I had to restart my pc up until I removed code causing the issue, only to realize that I was updating state inside render method

Mismatched HTTP error codes/messages is always funny and infuriating at the same time.

{ code: 200, message: 'Error' }

I've even seen 3xx codes thst contained JSON valid responses just because the logic in the BE was returning these responses with a broken method. "Funniest" part is that it populated a no longer existent route for the location along the redirect code so every client that fetched this endpoint will fail weirdly

Server be like:

"An Ode to Scones cannot parse."

I worked on a very bulky, old UNISYS mainframe that was the Frankensteined back end to some Java and .NET apps. We had test data entries for various things, but with it being a system that dealt with medical data (ICD codes, etc) we sometimes needed ridiculous numbers of complex records to crunch all at once.

One test situation we ran involved a very wide swath of test records. Everything processed except one: it had a field that was somehow breaking other stuff but at least showed "An Ode to Scones cannot parse".

So we pulled it individually, and lo and behold the name is indeed "An Ode to Scones" with an entire recipe stuffed into one field. A screenshot was taken, emails were circulated, and someone fessed up to putting it there decades ago. It was the scone recipe that was used in the cafeteria of a neighboring office building back in the day.

HIVE_PARTITION_SCHEMA_MISMATCH: There is a mismatch between the table and partition schemas. The types are incompatible and cannot be coerced. The column 'sessions' in table 'analytics.metrics_table' is declared as type 'bigint', but partition 'y=2023/m=08/d=23' declared column 'bouncerate' as type 'double'.
This query ran against the "analytics" database, unless qualified by the query. Please post the error message on our forum or contact customer support with Query Id: xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx

Not found but immediately after watching The Mandalorian season 1, myself and another dev were creating a large API for some external services to connect to so we spiced up some weird errors with "You have not provided {INSERT NECESSARY FIELD}. I have spoken" and the classic HTTP 418 I'm A Teapot.

Someone out there might have found it and I hope they at least got a laugh out of the errors.

Here's an old one from adobe that cracks me up.

What does that last choice mean?

Maybe it could've just said, "Do not open" 😁

I try to save off a snapshot of stupid error messages.
Here's one I recently received from outlook:

Back in the days of hand-coding JavaScript for IE5 on Mac:

Error on line 0, column 0
Error: ''

“Transaction cannot start in firehose mode” in Microsoft SQL Server.

When I once implemented a form submission to an API and the success of it was an error message! It gave 200 in the request but the return message was an error. It was funny 🤣