UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.71 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Have the browser load a font file (I was loading the Lato font: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lato) by applying the font to some text using @font-face
2. Get the browser to load the exact same font file (from the same URL) and apply the font in the duplicate file to some text. 
(This is the part I was unable to reproduce. The network tab in the dev tools gives a different initiator every time the fonts are loaded for the second time. Therefore I've no idea what causes the second load).

What is the expected behavior?
The font applies to the text, even after the same font is loaded a second time.

What went wrong?
The text disappears when the font is loaded for the second time.

Did this work before? N/A 

Does this work in other browsers? Yes

Chrome version: 54.0.2840.71  Channel: n/a
OS Version: Ubuntu 16.04
Flash Version: Shockwave Flash 23.0 r0

Removing any of the following from either my webapp or my dev tools causes the fonts not to load twice:
* Browsersync
* certain combinations of web components (Polymer)
* my javascript bundle containing library code
* my javascript bundle containing application code

These are probably all red herrings. The problem is only reliably related to whether or not the browser loads the same font a second time.