Sometimes, in extremely rare instances, external stylesheets may fail to download or be properly applied

There have been very rare occurrences where major websites like Amazon and Facebook do not load a CSS file or apply the rules correctly, resulting in pages looking incomplete:

I was recently asked to provide an internal explanation after receiving a complaint email with a screenshot from a user showing a similar issue on one of our websites. The screenshot contains confidential information, so I cannot share it here, but it clearly shows that inline styles are working while external CSS files are not being applied.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to replicate this issue myself. I am struggling to come up with a detailed explanation beyond "styles not being applied", and I would really appreciate insight into understanding the root cause.

If anyone has any thoughts on why this might occur or references to helpful articles, I would be grateful for the input. Even if you know what this phenomenon is called, I would be keen to do further research, as my current search has yielded no results.

Answer №1

There are multiple scenarios in which this situation can arise:

1) Bandwidth problems: like italo.nascimento mentioned, a slow internet connection where your HTML loads but the CSS times out, leaving you with an unstyled page (especially common during a DoS attack or when a website is experiencing high traffic)

2) Caching issues: if changes are made to your HTML but the CSS is served from the browser's cache, resulting in mismatched selectors...

3) FOUC: although not directly related to your question, if the screenshots were taken during the page loading process, it could be a case of Flash of Unstyled Content.

In most cases, about 90% of these issues stem from connection problems such as dropped packets, timeouts, malfunctioning CDNs... Since they are random and cannot be reproduced easily, they may not have a straightforward solution.

Answer №2

I've experienced this issue multiple times on popular websites.

Usually, it occurs when the Internet connection is extremely slow or unstable, causing the files not to load properly from the server (resulting in lost packages) and displaying the site in basic HTML. You might be able to replicate this by restricting your bandwidth and refreshing the page.

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