Depends on the situation and the audience. "Sorry, our engineers didn't allocate enough resources or our programmers didn't account for your specific inputs, s

Depends on the situation and the audience. "Sorry, our engineers didn't allocate enough resources or our programmers didn't account for your specific inputs, so we can't process your request." sounds reasonable to me. An error message because of a blank input field should not apologize and should simply say, "Your email address was left blank, please enter a valid email address below." Saying "sorry" would be like saying, "sorry you messed up, dummy". For a 404 message, it's difficult to tell whether or not the link came from a 3rd party or your own website, so I'd argue that simply saying, "page not found" is sufficient. "Sorry, our systems are overwhelmed at the moment, please try again later." is better than "Our systems can't handle this much traffic, come back later." http://imgur.com/asdfasdf http://imgur.com/asdfasdf https://github.com/asdfasdfasdfb https://github.com/asdfasdfasdfb