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If you use the string “try again later” in an error message you should go straight to jail. It should be a standard rule in all linters.

I'd be curious to know what your standard solution has been to handle that scenario; everybody seems to have a slightly different approach. My general approach is to give them a message saying that an unknown error occurred and a link in the notif to an incident page, pre-filled with details.

Define “that scenario”

Sorry, I meant the scenario where one would normally 'Try again later', because the error is unknown and they don't know how to appropriately message the user.

When would you not know what the problem is?

I’m being a little bit facetious but you _always_ know something. If this is because you made some API call and got a 503 or whatever you know that you can’t currently talk to the backend and you should hopefully be able to link the user to more information (status page, support email, etc)

If you don’t have a status page, or you don’t have any way to communicate with your users when you have an outage, that’s a separate problem you need to fix.

I agree with that. Let me ask you though, if my app is up and the issue is say one endpoint in an API and not the entire integration, how would I meaningfully report expectations and resolution to the end user?

I don’t see how that changes anything. You would have a separate status page that reports that that endpoint is having problems. The error message can direct users to the status page. From there it’s the same playbook as before.

Oh! Yes, definitely agree with that. Same for opt-outs and other compliance critical things.

For all the flack they get lately, I think GitHub do outage comms really well. Every incident can be subscribed to so the updates go straight to your phone and you know when stuff is resolved, and their status page is broken up into all their core services. Would love to see more of this.