Wanted to access my credit card statement on Chase.com and encountered a couple of different error messages. It appears that Chase.com was having an outage. There are typically two flavors of outages: the planned outage (this is when the website or application needs to do some scheduled maintenance and the company has no choice but to completely stop a key site flow or the entire site) and the unplanned outage (this typically occurs when there is an unexpected software or hardware problem that brings down a key site flow or the entire site).

Here are some screenshots:

First thing I noticed when I encountered the page above was the “We’re sorry this website is temporarily unavailable” page title. I think better content would be to refer to Chase.com or “we” i.e. “We’re sorry but we are currently undergoing maintenance.” or “We’re sorry but Chase.com is currently unavailable” — the reference to “this website” is a bit informal. I also noticed the “chase_outage.htm” in the URL. This made me wonder about whether or not this was planned or if this message is put up during an unplanned outage.

At various other points, I got the page below. It’s pretty clear that this page is not at all useful to the user.