Solution to Some Images Not Loading on Facebook

Break from photography for a second: I am a photographer, but I do have a graduate degree in computer engineering, so when a situation comes up that I can use my technical side, I get excited. Lately, I have been having problems with Facebook with some images showing up, but some others not loading up. I finally found a solution to Facebook not displaying all images and  this might be useful for you. The issue came up on all my browsers so I knew it was not a browser or plug-in thing. I also turned off firewall on my computer and also on my router. No go. It was doing the same thing. I then realized that the images that showed up were being served by the domain:

scontent-b-sea.xx.fbcdn.net

and images not showing up were served by:

scontent-a-sea.xx.fbcdn.net

Changing the “a” to “b” manually made the image show up. This is probably a load balancing thing for Facebook, but it is not working properly right now. So the solution is to send all requests by your computer to the “b” server instead of the “a” server. To do that, on a Windows computer, you can edit the HOSTS file. Here is how to edit the hosts file on a Windows machine.

For MACs, this is how you edit the hosts file.

You need to add the following line to your HOSTS file. I didn’t have to reboot for this to take effect but just closed and opened up my browser. You might need to restart.

Add the following line to your HOSTS file:

31.13.76.20 scontent-a-sea.xx.fbcdn.net

at the end.

Let me know if this helps!