Error 502 (what Does It Mean?)

so when the forums were down I got an "Error 502: Bad Gateway." What does that mean? What causes this bad gateway?

 

There were just issues with the server/site a few hours ago, everyone got that issue.

It's fixed now so don't sweat it.

 

I am aware of that, I'm just wondering what the error phrase (?) means (like, what is a gateway, and what classifies as bad).

 

I don't know the exact error code and what it means, that's meant for Devs to know so they know how to fix it.
It's the kind of thing that you either know it because you have to know it to fix it, or you don't know it.

If you want to try to figure it out then you'll have to go searching because you won't find the answer here unless someone that knows what it means stumbles across this thread and tells you.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#5xx_Server_errors for a technical explanation.

ELI5 version: What you connect to when you go to our website isn't actually our server - it's a service called cloudflare which does a number of things for us. Error 502 means that they can't connect to our servers to actually load the website for you.