Hi! I’m posting this here because I’ve been unable to use the forum from Brazil for about a month now. I tried reaching out twice through the Contact Us form, but I haven’t heard back. The only way I can access the forum at the moment is by connecting through a US VPN.
What happens is pretty simple: the page itself opens, but it just sits on the loading spinner forever. I’ve tried different browsers, devices, and ISP, cleared caches, etc., and nothing works.
I did some digging and found that one of the files the forum needs to actually start is consistently returning a 503 error. Everything else seems to load normally. If I open that file directly, it works, but when the browser tries to load it as part of the forum, it fails. (do4ryrayvtpwi.cloudfront.net/assets/br/discourse-``<hash>.digested.js)
The interesting part is that this seems to depend on where the request is coming from:
- My normal connection in Brazil: fails
- A VPN with a Brazilian server: fails
- A VPN with a US server: works
That makes me think this probably isn’t an issue with my ISP or my connection specifically. It looks more like something going wrong with the CDN/cache serving Brazil or South America.
If that’s the case, there may be quite a few people in the region who simply haven’t been able to use the forum for the past month. From the outside it just looks like the site is stuck loading, so most people probably wouldn’t know what was happening.
For whoever maintains the forum: the failing request is the main discourse-*.digested.js file served from do4ryrayvtpwi.cloudfront.net. It returns 503 when loaded by the forum, but works when accessed directly. My guess is that there’s either a bad cached response somewhere in CloudFront or an issue with how that file is being served for cross-origin requests in the South America region.
I’m happy to test anything if it helps. I have an easy way to compare a failing connection in Brazil with a working one through the US.
Is anyone else in Brazil or elsewhere in South America seeing this?
