Dear valued user, You have reached the error page for the error page
28 comments
·July 18, 2025yegle
This was added in 2004. Before this change, the error message was:
> If too many of these happen, someone will be paged. If you still see this after half an hour, send mail to xxxxxxxxxxx@google.com
(For curious folks working for Hooli, the magic number is 472481)
crgk
I’m getting an imgur error page, but it seems this post is meant to be an image of a Google error page?
I’ve reached the error page of the image of the error page for the error page. We’re too deep.
Tiberium
Imgur really hates VPNs, and will show that bogus error page if you're not using a "nice" connection.
andrepd
Lol, so meta.
Also: very sad, but it would be great if it was just imgur doing this; it's the whole internet.
bhaney
Now to refresh this comment until HN randomly goes down
SchwKatze
You found the easter egg gem!
The fact that google's engineers cared about doing that it's pretty funny
henry700
Probably done over a decade ago. Today we wouldn't see this
pi_22by7
oh, for sureee
hnlmorg
That explains why we aren’t talking about it today then.
fnordpiglet
Source code isn’t written afresh every day. The point was the code was written at a different era and the current era wouldn’t produce this sort of code, and presumably you wouldn’t see anything but a generic 500. This is likely because product managers can’t stand free thought and action amongst engineers as it doesn’t appease their bean counter overlords sufficiently.
mister_mort
Always leave a message in "impossible" code paths, you never know who might read it in the end.
rc_mob
You have 7 different gmail accounts eh?
Alex3917
Yeah unfortunately they are tricky to get rid of once you have them. In theory I can forward the email from one account to another, but in practice it's hard to think through all the weird security issues that might arise from doing so.
zaik
Confuse your coworkers by telling them you "won Gmail once".
larrymcp
The funny thing is, this error message is hardly less useful than the recent trend of error messages which say only, "Something went wrong".
hinkley
Have you never dealt with customers reporting errors?
Something went wrong is what they will tell you and expect an answer. Doesn’t matter how fancy and detailed the error, you will get back, “it’s broken fix it.”
hnlmorg
Back in the early days of my career and supporting end users, I used to constantly get people say:
“xxx doesn’t work. I just get an error”
“I don’t remember. I’ve closed it now”.
rkagerer
Maybe all errors should be presented with a simple, distinctive and memorable theme - e.g. show a pig photo in that one maybe they'll remember "I got the pig error"
pphysch
What would you expect? IME these are mostly unforeseen 500 errors, logged internally, and not something a client can do anything about (or should know anything about, for security reasons).
null
Just got to this error page by refreshing my Gmail tab, seeing the Gmail error page, and then refreshing the error page and getting this. Never seen this posted on the Internet before, but I thought it was interesting.