Images not loading on Facebook

Question

I'm usually a great debugger when it comes to helping family members with their computer problems, I also would normally post this type of question here, but I'm hoping this community can help me get to the bottom of this.

A family member is having problems with certain websites not loading all of the resources, primarily images is what it appears. I have disabled her Symantec protection in case it was scanning or preventing stuff from loading and have also uninstalled and disabled startup applications she doesn't need.

One example of a file that is not loading on her system is: http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yp/r/kk8dc2UJYJ4.png

I'm assuming this loads for everyone else here.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated. Also she gets a similar issue in IE, Chrome, Firefox.

Answer 1

Thats probably because your DNS resolves the Akamai CDN server, used by facebook to fetch images, to an IP address that is not reachable from your network. You may want to get the IP address of facebook CDNs used by your computer at the time this happens and contact your network administrator to find the reason behind the IP blockage (may be because of firewall). Other than that, you can try changing your DNS in your system settings which might give you an IP address that works for your network.

PS: I ran into this issue a few weeks ago and have found my findings to be correct.

Answer 2

The first place I'd look is if there's a commercial ad-blocker installed, as I guess it can't be an add-in/extension as different browsers have their own settings.

And it may sound silly, but did you check the hosts file (system32/drivers/etc/hosts)? Is it possible static.ak.fbcdn.net is just being redirected? You might want to try opening the command prompt and just doing ping static.ak.fbcdn.net and confirming her computer's exact behavior.

In my case FB redirects me to a749.g.akamai.net (or 125.56.208.11) and everything works fine.

Minor edit: I'm a bit skeptical that's the cause, as FB serves other stuff from that domain (CSS, JS). Photos and profile pictures seem to come from a different domain. But I'd still be interested in whether the problem occurs when connecting to the resource or displaying it.