“Secretary Rubio” refers to Marco Rubio, the American politician serving as the 72nd United States Secretary of State in President Donald Trump’s second administration. As Secretary of State, he is the top U.S. diplomat and head of the U.S. Department of State, responsible for conducting U.S. foreign policy and representing the United States abroad.
The “Al Thani” mentioned as Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs is Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani. He has served as Prime Minister of Qatar since March 7, 2023, and as Qatar’s Minister of Foreign Affairs since 2016.
The message “We’re sorry, this site is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Exception: forbidden” on state.gov indicates a server‑side problem with the State Department’s website, not something the user can fix. Public information does not explain the specific cause, but similar wording is commonly used by WordPress‑based sites when there is an internal error or misconfiguration on the server. It is best understood as a temporary technical or configuration issue on state.gov’s side, rather than a sign that you personally lack permission or clearance to view the page. The exact internal cause for this particular error on state.gov has not been publicly documented.
If the main state.gov page for the meeting stays unavailable, an official U.S. government copy of the readout is available on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Qatar. It provides the same short summary: Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in Washington to launch the seventh U.S.–Qatar Strategic Dialogue, reaffirming the U.S.–Qatar partnership and discussing economic and security cooperation. In addition, the U.S. and Qatari governments jointly released a detailed “Joint Statement on the Seventh Qatar–United States Strategic Dialogue” on Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs site, which extensively summarizes what was discussed around security, Gaza, economic ties, and other issues.
Yes. Multiple official and reputable sources confirm that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s meeting with Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani took place on December 17, 2025, in Washington, D.C., as part of the seventh U.S.–Qatar (Qatar–U.S.) Strategic Dialogue. The U.S. Embassy in Qatar published an official readout of Rubio’s meeting with Al Thani, and the governments of Qatar and the United States jointly issued a detailed “Joint Statement on the Seventh Qatar–United States Strategic Dialogue” describing the talks on Gaza, regional security, defense cooperation, and major economic deals. Independent coverage by Anadolu Agency also reports on the same meeting and notes it launched the seventh U.S.–Qatar Strategic Dialogue and discussed Gaza ceasefire issues.
There is no widely publicized, dedicated public “status” or outage page for the State Department’s main website (state.gov) comparable to the status dashboards used by large technology companies. When parts of state.gov show messages like “We’re sorry, this site is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Exception: forbidden,” they generally appear without an accompanying official public incident report. Third‑party uptime‑monitoring sites track whether state.gov is reachable, but these are not operated by the U.S. government. Because the State Department does not publish statistics on such incidents, there is no reliable public data on how often individual press releases become temporarily unavailable; what can be observed is that availability issues are usually temporary and often resolved when checked again later.