Why is a website having a fatal error?

Question

When I was going on to Deviantart.com, a white screen appeared and said...

Fatal error: Call to undefined function html_extra_special_chars() in /hd/a/www/deviantart.com/vms/lib/submit/v./utils.php on line 1321

... I don't know what this means or if it's because of my computer.

Answer 1

A fatal error is caused on a website running PHP if the script running on the server cannot complete running for some reason. This is normally caused by a file not being included correctly, a database connection being lost or a user error from the programmer.



The error you are seeing is being caused because the function "html_extra_special_chars()" has not been defined within the script but has been called. The code does not know what html_extra_special_chars() does and therefore just fails because it doesn't know what it's doing.



This is nothing caused by your computer and is completely on the server side of the website - It would be nice to contact the website provider in case they haven't realised it is happening.

Answer 2

Usually it would be a database error with their website, or server downtime, etc.

Answer 3

It's not your computer but their site.



You should contact them about it.