*sigh* several weeks ago, I tried to view something on Harvard University's rare manuscript site ("Curiosity Collections"), but the images were all broken. Digging into the javascript console, I found that the images are not missing from the server if you extract their URLs, but the json is being put together wrong and the viewer can't parse it.

I sent an email to the site's contact person with all the info I had. They were apologetic and said their maintainers were "aware" of the issue, but the vague reason they gave me (a VPN issue) doesn't make a lot of sense in the context that the images are all loadable if you know their URL and the viewer is crashing in a json parsing function. So I suspect someone told the contact person a plausible-sounding reason without investigating. At the very least, they don't seem to be trying at all to fix it.

So the rare manuscripts website of a world-major university has been languishing broken for several weeks at minimum, but who knows how long it'd been like that before I, personally, noticed. I guess this is a "state of American education" post.