Explore our sites

Stack Exchange
tour help
up vote 7 down vote favorite

Stack Overflow seems to be having some CSS issues right now. At first, it presented as CSS disappearing when refreshing in Firefox (though hitting Enter from the address bar seemed to restore it - I'm thinking that's a cache issue though). I loaded my blank Firefox profile and discovered CSS wasn't rendering on Stack Overflow at all (Meta seems fine; haven't checked other SE sites).

I've since checked the site in Chrome and Opera, and can repro in both.

share|improve this question
 
Here's a related question and how I fixed it. meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/102257/css-not-loaded-in-so/… –  sebagomez Aug 18 '11 at 21:09
 
Have same issue. cdn.sstatic.net is unreachable for me. Problem gone about a couple of minutes ago and reappeared just now. –  jibiel Jul 12 at 7:04
add comment

1 Answer

up vote 4 down vote

The CSS is loaded from the Stack Exchange static resources domain, using a third-party Content Delivery Network:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
  href="https://cdn.sstatic.net/stackoverflow/all.css?v=62fd31659efc">

Are you sure cdn.sstatic.net is not somehow blocked (or otherwise non-reachable) in your system/network? Beware it uses HTTPS. When troubleshooting the CDN, see some information the team likes to see in Intermittent Responses from CDN.

The ?v= is just a cache breaker, to ensure a new version is loaded if it has changed; it does not load a specific version. Also note that Meta does not use sstatic.net:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
  href="/content/stackoverflowmeta/all.css?v=5ace4c636510">

The same applies to the JavaScript libraries.

share|improve this answer
 
(No issues here in any of my browsers.) –  Arjan Mar 31 '11 at 9:59
 
This may have simply been time sensitive, as everything is working properly for me now as well. To address your answer though, if sstatic.net were blocked, meta would have had the same issues, and I'm sure I would have noticed the issue before (home network, haven't changed anything lately). If it were caching, it wouldn't have been an issue in the other browsers. I'm guessing I just happened to see the site hiccup - perhaps a code push that went slightly awry? –  AgentConundrum Mar 31 '11 at 10:02
 
No, @Jesse, Meta is not using that server. (Maybe for easier testing?) Still, you might be right: maybe sstatic.net itself was not responding for a moment? –  Arjan Mar 31 '11 at 10:21
 
I didn't realize Meta didn't use sstatic.net. All the other sites do. I guess Meta is special. With that in mind, you're probably right about sstatic.net not responding for a couple minutes. –  AgentConundrum Mar 31 '11 at 10:26
1  
Yeah, meta serves static content itself, indeed for easier testing before rolling out changes network-wide (this wouldn't be so much of an issue for CSS, since that's site-specific, but all sites share the same JavaScript files). –  balpha♦ Mar 31 '11 at 11:38
add comment

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .