@JourneymanGeek This is crazy, bear with me. In general images hosted on i.sstatic.net do not show when I access them from home or from work (same town, same ISP); let's call it "location A". I can ssh to a certain home router (another town, different ISP); let's call it "location B". It turned out I can access (wget) any image from B. Now the crazy part: once an image is accesses from B, it becomes accessible from A.

In fact I think the link that started to work for me (i.e. for location A) yesterday did this also because I had accessed it from B.

I have made several images accessible for A by accessing them from B. I did this one by one and I pretty sure this is how it works, not by accident.

Because an action at B "fixes" the problem for A, I think the problem is not on A, i.e. not on my side. Now I'd like to (1) understand how this is possible and (2) have it really fixed.

Is (1) on-topic on Super User? We have some savvy users who may give some insight, but the problem is not with my computer; I just want to understand. OTOH it may be problem specific to the CDN, so I guess off-topic.

With (2) I shall go to Meta, right? I have experienced the problem also on Ask Ubuntu, so I guess the main Meta (meta.stackexchange.com) is the place to go.

What to do now?

Not crazy - this sort of things happen

If its the same laptop, if you accessed it from B, it might be caching

no wait

yeah, that is wierd

which site is correct is tricky - MSE will get more eyes, and you might nerdbait a dev. I can poke someone about it/retag it on SU tho

There was a question where images started working "by themselves". Now I think someone else had accessed them from my country (surrounding region or so) and did the job of B for me.

@JourneymanGeek What if I asked two questions and linked one to another? One on SU for technical understanding and another on the main Meta as a bug report. Or is it by principle better to post one question?

I think this is very much something for the devs to sort out

I'm no dev, but it smells like some CDN oddness or you're hitting different servers

So meta.stackexchange.com , nowhere else; right?

ya

I guess

OK. Thanks.

include the bits about the RayID error thing

it'll help

I understand, I will.

@JourneymanGeek Question asked: meta.stackexchange.com/q/399031/355310