system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What happens when a modern website "breaks" and it suddenly looks like 1990s basic HTML?

Amazon was doing this to me earlier. Instead of the modern, graphics-heavy site, it was stuck on an crappy version with long lists of blue links instead of images. It finally corrected itself.
gpt
To load a page you generally need to download a HTML file with all the text in, a CSS file which describes how to format the text, then whatever images the page includes. If the CSS doesn't download properly then you get all the text, but with the browser's default styling. Eventually you'll manage to download the CSS and start seeing pages properly again.