You know sometimes it is a polite way to say that " it is YOU who messed it up, so why don't you analyze what you have or have not done and try to fix it"
I see my GET request for show_ads.js is failing. So perhaps that nonloading javascript is suppose to make it appear but it's non working at the moment... Now, which excuses from the site would apply here?
Here's the first one that might make sense that showed up on my refresh: "It worked yesterday"
I'm not sure its hidden on purpose. There doesn't appear to be any styling to hide it, and when I went to the URL that the inner iframe was linking to (the iframe inside of the iframe), it gave a blank page.
I think Google banned the domain from Adsense. I had a neglected UGC site that gradually became inundated with shady links and content, and this happened to me. Perhaps a site with low clicks and repeated, short-lived ad serves is worth banning.
I was wondering why they didn't use jquery/JS to load data from a list rather than reload the page and create more web server hits. This would explain why.
I got 500 Internal Server Error with an additional 404 Not Found for the ErrorDocument, I had to wonder if that was a real excuse or genuine server error! Theirs a certain amount of irony to it anyway.
I got this twice and I went to go look at the response to see if it was actually a 200 implying that it was purposeful, but once I loaded up the dev console to see the headers I couldn't reproduce.
12 months ago while I was bored on a SFO to JFK flight I made a clone relevant to where I was working at the time http://frsexcuses.com which got featured by 9to5Mac [1] and still to this day gets a little bit of traffic as the domain is about to expire
Nice site, but seems weird wrapping the text in a <href> and wrapping that in a center. As somebody else said on the comments, why couldn't be just plain text/have a plain text header?
An excuse being an attempt to justify a fault, I don't consider that an excuse. That one is a fact, and it's not the programmers fault when it happens.
I got "The third-party API is not responding" the first time, and I thought for a second that it was a 500-class server error. Then I reloaded, and laughed.
I have actually seen something that was thought to be an application error tracked down to a faulty firewall device - that was a fun bug to investigate :-)
The first time I loaded the page I was expecting some writeup on programmer excuses, instead I was presented with a page that said "Our servers are too slow to cope with the demand" or something similar and I thought "OK, a bit too honest calling their servers slow, but the message is clear" so I decided to wait a bit until HN traffic died down