Why does my checkout say “Something went wrong, please try again later”?

That generic message means the place-order request threw a server-side exception that Magento hid from the shopper. The real cause is in var/log/exception.log, usually a payment-gateway error, a third-party plugin throwing during quote-to-order conversion, or an Area code not set in a custom observer. We read the matching log line, reproduce it on staging, fix the throwing code, then place a full test order to confirm it’s gone.