Apache 2.4 Failed To Start AH00016: Configuration Failed October 5, 2014 james Apache , Ubuntu Server One of our Apache 2.4 web servers strangely stopped working and didn’t want to come back up. I tried to start it but it came back with a vague error message: $ sudo service apache2 start Starting web server apache2 Action 'start' failed. The Apache error log may have more information. A quick look in /var/log/apache2/error.log just showed nothing useful: $ tail var/log/apache2/error.log AH00016: Configuration Failed, exiting So, I ran the Apache configuration check tool on the configuration files but the syntax was okay. $ sudo apache2ctl configtest Syntax OK This means that there isn’t anything wrong with the syntax of the Apache config and I generally find that this means either an SSL certificate isn’t installed incorrectly or there is something wrong with a more general configuration file. To find which host had configuration file prob...