SOLR-17209: Fix NullPointerException in QueryComponent (#2354)

---------

Co-authored-by: Vincent Primault <vprimault@salesforce.com>
Co-authored-by: Eric Pugh <epugh@opensourceconnections.com>
diff --git a/solr/CHANGES.txt b/solr/CHANGES.txt
index 44f5803..7cf02fd 100644
--- a/solr/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/solr/CHANGES.txt
@@ -148,6 +148,8 @@
 * SOLR-14892: Queries with shards.info and shards.tolerant can yield multiple null keys in place of shard names
   (Mathieu Marie, David Smiley)
 
+* SOLR-17209: Fix NullPointerException in QueryComponent (Vincent Primault via Eric Pugh)
+
 Dependency Upgrades
 ---------------------
 
diff --git a/solr/core/src/java/org/apache/solr/handler/component/QueryComponent.java b/solr/core/src/java/org/apache/solr/handler/component/QueryComponent.java
index 8b34422..4f17cb7 100644
--- a/solr/core/src/java/org/apache/solr/handler/component/QueryComponent.java
+++ b/solr/core/src/java/org/apache/solr/handler/component/QueryComponent.java
@@ -956,7 +956,7 @@
 
         if (srsp.getException() != null) {
           Throwable t = srsp.getException();
-          if (t instanceof SolrServerException) {
+          if (t instanceof SolrServerException && t.getCause() != null) {
             t = t.getCause();
           }
           nl.add("error", t.toString());