Troubleshooting: .htaccess option +FollowSymLinks creates "500 Internal Server Error"

An increasing number of operating systems and hosts have tightened up their security settings and now forbids +FollowSymLinks option in the .htaccess file that comes with Drupal core. This causes an error 500 when accessing the site. When they introduced this policy they automatically converted +FollowSymLinks to +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch. More details can be found here.

Solution: Change the following entry in your .htaccess file

From:

# Follow symbolic links in this directory.
Options +FollowSymLinks

To:

# Follow symbolic links in this directory.
Options -SymLinksIfOwnerMatch