Weeeelp… I See both sides of this. There’s some things you anticipate to go wrong, like a disk being out of space, or an API to not respond. Those are the type of things you can (and should strive to!) provide meaningful error messages for.

But then, there’s also that class of things that fail in exciting and unexpected ways: a bit randomly flipping in memory, a cable detached in an untimely moment, a missing system library that was there when the program started… you cannot enumerate all things that may fail unexpectedly, hence the only viable solution is to have a special case for those - „Unexpected error“ doesn’t sound wrong from that perspective.

Still, it’s completely useless to the human in front of the machine, so there’s that.

In such cases the dialog box could at least have a button "Show details" which provides the technical error message or code and some context, such that an advanced user has a chance to fix it. To the average noob this will make no difference, therefore A/B testing will select against it. But all the advanced users, admin will keep being infuriated.

The useless error messages are still my number one reason to avoid anything from Microsoft.

My favorite lately is "Something went wrong". Thank you, error message writer! How is this even a remotely acceptable error description? You might as well just crash.

Yes, exactly. I kept getting a "Sorry, something went wrong" with no error code when trying to give a third-party app permissions with my (paid!) Google account, and the most probably reason was that my accounts were locked temporarily due to suspicious activity.

There is no information on how long this will last, there is nothing I can do to fix this, and of course, there is no customer support available. I can't even confirm that waiting will actually fix this, as there is no error code. I thought the people at Google would know better.

Not to the user, but to the program, it can be expecting some errors as natural outcomes of a certain call, while not expecting others.

“Unexpected error” basically means “I called a function that threw an exception, but didn’t have code in place to catch it, so it hit some toplevel global exception handler that just aborts the whole thing.”