This is happening frequently in automated browser tests running in production for all browsers. I have reproduced it manually as well, although it happens much less frequently for users, it still happens.
On http://en.wikipedia.org (at least), click 'Random page' a number of times. At some point, one of the resulting pages will have no left-side navigation in place. See screen shot.
This issue seems to have begun happening on June 28.
Version: 1.22.0
Severity: major
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49911