Saw a bank's login page break into a comic sans nightmare yesterday

I was helping my grandpa check his savings account on a local credit union's website and the whole login form just exploded into some kind of 1990s web wreck. The buttons were stacked on top of each other, the text boxes overlapped, and somehow the font switched to comic sans for the error message. It said something like 'Invalid Credentials' in bright pink letters with a weird shadow effect. I took a screenshot because I still don't believe it was real. Has anyone else seen a big company's CSS completely fall apart like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

dixon.anthony14d ago

Whoa that is hilarious and terrible at the same time! I had a similar thing happen with a big insurance company's payment portal last year. The whole page just went blank except for a tiny broken image icon and the words "We're sorry" written in what looked like Times New Roman from Windows 95. I had to screenshot it too because it looked like someone's first HTML project gone wrong. What got me was the submit button actually worked even though the page looked completely wrecked. Sometimes I think these big companies just have one person maintaining their whole site and they lose track of what's actually live.

oscarwilliams14d ago

Oh man, did you catch that article about the healthcare.gov launch a while back? That thing was a disaster too lol. I get what you're saying @dixon.anthony, it feels like someone just threw spaghetti at the wall and hoped it stuck. I actually read somewhere that a lot of these big companies use interns or junior devs to push updates without checking what breaks first. A buddy of mine works at a bank and he said they sometimes have three different versions of the same page running at once because nobody wants to be the one to merge them all together. What really gets me is how the broken stuff still works underneath the mess like the backend is fine but the frontend just gave up.