Cisco home page FAIL

UPDATE: it’s over 2 hours later now and they’ve finally fixed it :)

Cisco’s home page this morning: looks like they ran out of their allocation of lowercase letter ‘t’ (thanks to Chris Venus for pointing it out):

image

Or was it “Speak Like an Irishman” day and nobody told me?

Lowercase ‘t’s were being stripped from the source which explains why there were no styles, etc:

image

Chris reckons it’s a possibly a whitespace-trimming RegEx gone wrong, WDYT?

41 Comments so far

  1. psilo on September 25, 2008

    Sounds like Chris is right to me.

    They tried to replace tabs with the empty string and WHOOPS!

  2. crazy pete reckons... on September 25, 2008

    …its \t instead of \\t

  3. Datrio on September 25, 2008

    Regex problem for sure, somebody just wrote \tt instead of \t (single tab).

    Still, funny like some stupid error like this can completely destroy a page.

  4. bse on September 25, 2008

    probably a missing backslash in front of a t, to remove tabs

  5. Jordan on September 25, 2008

    My favorite is “Skip o Fooer”. I think I knew him once… good kid…

  6. hazexp on September 25, 2008

    Personally, I just think that the internets in their ‘t’ tube got clogged. I hear they have one for each letter of the alphabet.

    [/bad-joke]

  7. kchan on September 25, 2008

    wants to save a few bytes, strips the whole page out in the end. the IT guys in the rush to go home probably. i had that a lot of time :P

  8. Mister.de on September 25, 2008

    excellent and almost epic fail :)

  9. Nlflux on September 25, 2008

    Some parts of the website are still affected:

    http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/ps5475/index.html

  10. Guest on September 25, 2008

    Absoluely brillian! Wha will happen if they run ou of the leer ‘e’?

    hy will b in ral roubl whn ha happns. h si will b complly down e ub!

  11. Guest on September 25, 2008

    Oops, I made a mistake in the last line:

    Absoluely brillian! Wha will happen if they run ou of the leer ‘e’?

    hy will b in ral roubl whn ha happns. h si will b complly down h ub!

  12. Waler on September 25, 2008

    Tha is prey funny suff!!1

  13. odie on September 25, 2008

    I can’ undersand wha all he fuss is abou?

  14. Ben Mc on September 25, 2008

    Oops. Guess they messed up some backslashes.

  15. Chrisopher on September 25, 2008

    ha’s he mos funnies shi ha I ha ever seen! Maybe while hey are working on i, hey can fix some of he issues ha have been plaguing heir oher producs.

  16. Buford Twain on September 25, 2008

    silly cuns!

  17. matt on September 25, 2008

    new ACL implementation

    ip access-list Interenet-OUT
    deny ip any any “t”

  18. Alan Thompson on September 25, 2008

    I’ve lived in Ireland for 3 years now and I’ve never heard anyone talk like that, but whatever floats your boat limey.

  19. Dwayne from Probably Sucks on September 25, 2008

    Cisco sucks, one again.

  20. Wow on September 25, 2008

    they are sh*t at teh interwebs!

  21. cak on September 26, 2008

    Clearly the credit crises is even hitting large companies like Cisco, who usually reverse the trends of other IT companies on the stick market. The t’s are the first to go, and then the dots of the i’s. If this continues for much longer, we may need to actually change our language.

  22. gokulanand on September 26, 2008

    Can’t believe these guys make such mistakes.

  23. ojtibi on September 26, 2008

    ‘Tis is hilarious! For teh win! ROFLCOPTER!

  24. sapteka on September 26, 2008

    No body’s perfect.

  25. Ryan on September 26, 2008

    Whitespace stripping is kind of redundant if you gzip your shiznitz *shrug*

  26. ianislost on September 26, 2008

    HAHA. IRISH SPEAKING DAY FTW! :))

  27. krist0ph3r on September 26, 2008

    nice one!!! this is why i love regexes!!!

    one thing i noticed is that there’s no place where there should have been an uppercase T on the page…so i can’t figure if he did a /ig or just a /g :D

  28. matt on September 26, 2008

    And the Fail Whale appears above the surface to snicker at CISCO.

  29. George P. Burdell on September 26, 2008

    I smell a Georgia Tech student behind this… stealing Ts is an old tradition at Tech.

  30. johnbillion on September 26, 2008

    @krist0ph3r: Under the ‘Soluions’ menu there’s TelePresence. Must have been just /g :)

  31. anang5 on September 26, 2008

    haaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaa :)

  32. DF on September 26, 2008

    More failures in design and usability are here:

    http://designfail.wordpress.com/

  33. Robert on September 26, 2008

    Last Friday was Talk Like a Pirate Day. This must be Talk Like a Scotsman Day!

  34. TERN on September 26, 2008

    Poor old cisco. Who wants to see this happening in their company.

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  37. DF on September 27, 2008

    I used to work for Cisco at their San Jose, CA campus as a software engineer. Well, what should I say.. No surprise for me at all. I think only 10% of Cisco population is really doing something valuable. The other 90% are useless managers, managers of managers managing the big groups of indian programmers on H1B visa who are doing nothing valuable but keep themselves employed. I’ve seen groups of 20-40 developers who are 100% indian. I do not have anything against indian engineers, but such Cisco unspoke policy shows some employment preferences.

  38. Leefe on September 28, 2008

    Just as well IT is written in capitals. Otherwise people would think their are too self centered, and only an ‘i’ company. :)

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  41. zoly on October 27, 2008

    lot of page redirections, “page cannot found”s, now homepage? :))

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