[Reader] Failed loading images after clicking "click to retry" (2024)

If you're seeing click to retry, it means you've failed to load the chapter images from two separate sources and failed the first auto-retry, so something is wrong.

You need to be able to access "uploads.mangadex.org" and "*.mangadex.network" to use MD, and those may be being inconsistently blocked.

Try a VPN like Cloudflare Warp - if this fixes the issue, there's something wrong with your routing to MD.

Syanindita said:

See that images? Sometimes I got a bad loading chapters like this, when this happen it's almost impossible to reload.

Clicking that red "click to retry" is no use. Refresh the page? Closing the tab? Even closing the browser and reopen it again? No use.. That big red click to retry still appears.

I hope developer can resolve that one. Browsing from mobile browser

Click to expand...

Have the same issue and have seen other people say they have it. It's not on your end and it's not gonna get fixed. Best course of action is just finding the chapter on another site if possible and reading it there.

Aezeryel said:

Have the same issue and have seen other people say they have it. It's not on your end and it's not gonna get fixed. Best course of action is just finding the chapter on another site if possible and reading it there.

Click to expand...

Another option is incognito mode and maybe delete cookie things..

But it would be great in the future if you can just reload the pages

Aezeryel said:

Have the same issue and have seen other people say they have it. It's not on your end and it's not gonna get fixed. Best course of action is just finding the chapter on another site if possible and reading it there.

Click to expand...

I guarantee you it's on your end. Link a chapter where it happens for you, and I can check if the images exist.

Syanindita said:

Another option is incognito mode and maybe delete cookie things..

But it would be great in the future if you can just reload the pages

Click to expand...

See Also

Myreadingmanga: A Comprehensive Review [And Best Alterntives]MyReadingManga – How to Use the Online Manga Platform

Every image is automatically requested up to three times if the first two fail, if you're still unable to load the image at that point there's something very wrong on your side. After those three attempts you can try and reload the image again manually by clicking the red box, but if something is blocking your connection to us it's not going to work.

BraveDude8 said:

I guarantee you it's on your end. Link a chapter where it happens for you, and I can check if the images exist.

Every image is automatically requested up to three times if the first two fail, if you're still unable to load the image at that point there's something very wrong on your side. After those three attempts you can try and reload the image again manually by clicking the red box, but if something is blocking your connection to us it's not going to work.

Click to expand...

At that time.. After a combo of click the retry, refresh, close the tab, reopen browser not working. Somehow switch into incognito works

I'll revive this thread again in the future if I get into this situation again

BraveDude8 said:

I guarantee you it's on your end. Link a chapter where it happens for you, and I can check if the images exist.

Click to expand...

"Hey, there's this problem that multiple users have, that happens only on our site and that has started happening only since the new version of the site. Hmmmmm, must be a fault on the users' end."

Aezeryel said:

"Hey, there's this problem that multiple users have, that happens only on our site and that has started happening only since the new version of the site. Hmmmmm, must be a fault on the users' end."

Click to expand...

Multiple users can have the same problem. It's only on our end if every single user is having the exact same issue. Other websites are irrelevant to the discussion.

Aezeryel said:

"Hey, there's this problem that multiple users have, that happens only on our site and that has started happening only since the new version of the site. Hmmmmm, must be a fault on the users' end."

Click to expand...

Multiple users out of millions of unique users is entirely insignificant.

We have internal metrics, we know how the site is performing, and I can tell you that at individual regional level we have zero issues consistently serving images in a reasonable amount of time (<0.5s) to >99.9% of our users. The entire chapter is loaded from a single source by default, so if some images aren't loading your connection to our servers has been interrupted and there's not much we can do about that, as it's demonstratably not impacting the vast majority of the userbase.

And for the record, image loading in v5 is faster and more consistent than it used to be in v3.

Syanindita said:

See that images? Sometimes I got a bad loading chapters like this, when this happen it's almost impossible to reload.

Clicking that red "click to retry" is no use. Refresh the page? Closing the tab? Even closing the browser and reopen it again? No use.. That big red click to retry still appears.

I hope developer can resolve that one. Browsing from mobile browser

Click to expand...

Still an issue.

Teasday said:

Multiple users can have the same problem. It's only on our end if every single user is having the exact same issue. Other websites are irrelevant to the discussion.

Click to expand...

If the issue was on my end I'd be having problems with other sites as well, not just MD.

Aezeryel said:

If the issue was on my end I'd be having problems with other sites as well, not just MD.

Click to expand...

If the issue was on our end we'd see mass connection issues in our metrics, not just a few people. Internet connectivity is a complex metric, just because you have a good connection to major sites that can reliably peer everywhere in the world doesn't mean you've got a good connection to us. If a VPN fixes it, that's the issue.

TestAddress said:

Still an issue.

Click to expand...

Try going incognito.. It's a quick fix for that for my last attempt, but havent try it again so can't test the consistency

BraveDude8 said:

If the issue was on our end we'd see mass connection issues in our metrics, not just a few people. Internet connectivity is a complex metric, just because you have a good connection to major sites that can reliably peer everywhere in the world doesn't mean you've got a good connection to us. If a VPN fixes it, that's the issue.

Click to expand...

If the issue was on my end I'd be having problems with other sites as well. It's not just major sites, it's literally any site besides MD. I can open the most random manga site ever and it will load pages properly but MD decides to f*ck me over every now and again for no reason at all.

Aezeryel said:

If the issue was on my end I'd be having problems with other sites as well

Click to expand...

Brave already explained to you why that’s not a viable indicator

Aezeryel said:

It's not just major sites, it's literally any site besides MD. I can open the most random manga site ever

Click to expand...

All of them run on Cloudflare, so they are, from a networking perspective, all the exact 1 same site.

Aezeryel said:

MD decides to f*ck me over every now and again for no reason at all.

Click to expand...

Yes clearly we engineered the site to screw with you in particular every now and then. We also obviously really like the site glitching out for a minuscule minority of users in general.

Anyway, we appreciate that it’s frustrating to you, but we operate within constraints, and one of them is that we literally cannot drop millions of dollars a month like Cloudflare (& co) do to work around residential ISPs being sh*t.
And if you distrust us and believe it is our fault (though again, why the f*ck would we opt to not make our site work as well as possible?!), then all we can suggest is using another website that works better for you.

Aezeryel said:

If the issue was on my end I'd be having problems with other sites as well, not just MD.

Click to expand...

Aezeryel said:

If the issue was on my end I'd be having problems with other sites as well. It's not just major sites, it's literally any site besides MD. I can open the most random manga site ever and it will load pages properly but MD decides to f*ck me over every now and again for no reason at all.

Click to expand...

Do you know how the internet works? what a server is? how it even works that you can view images on MangaDex? I sure hope no. (see How does the INTERNET work?)
This isn't how the internet works. Just because site A works doesn't mean that site B works too. For example, microsoft google and amazon work so good because they pay a crap ton of money on this, that MangaDex doesn't have/doesn't want to spend since MangaDex is literally free.
And no, just because other manga sites work doesn't mean that MangaDex should work. Most manga sites abuse free cdn services like Cloudflare (e.g. bato, manganato, mangakakalot, mangabuddy, all other well known sites) and Cloudflare simply pays for those fees. MangaDex is one of the only sites that doesn't do this (anymore) and still the only site that keep that good of a service.
If you have issues try with a vpn or https://1.1.1.1, if the issue goes away, it's on you

Hey, full-stack dev here. I've encountered this issue as well, and while I unfortunately can't tell you how exactly to reproduce it (aside from having a bad connection/low reception), I can provide some additional details that will hopefully be of help to any dev reading this:

• The issue does not persist across browsers - though it may reoccur with a different set of pages.
• Using port 443 does not appear to fix the issue.
• Switching to low quality images only appears to solve the issue - switching back to high quality images reveals that the issue still persists for them (and vice versa).
• Rarely, the images might all reload (cache miss?) during the same session. In my case, this was likely due to leaving the page, then revisiting it after having switched networks. In this case the issue appeared to resolve itself, only to reoccur with the same pages as before upon reloading the page once again.
• The issue can also occur in Tachiyomi, though much less frequently - perhaps due to different loading strategies.

My two cents about this situation:
This appears to be either the browser/client caching and serving a failed response instead of sending a new request to the server, or a rate limiter/anti-DDoS measure that 1) blocks all requests for a specific asset if a session has requested it too many times in a row, and 2) doesn't have a cooldown system in place to allow said session to access the asset again after some time has passed.

The rate limiter/anti-DDoS option seems to me to be the more likely one (especially considering the history of this site), and is the one I'd recommend looking into first.

Feel free to ask me if you need any additional information about this problem, and I'll do my best to answer.

Aezeryel said:

If the issue was on my end I'd be having problems with other sites as well, not just MD.

Click to expand...

To clarify, I said it's only on our end if it affects everyone, because the bad data would be right at the source in that case. That doesn't mean it therefore must be on your end, i.e. your browser, device, settings, etc., because there's a lot of stuff that's happening in the connection between your device and our servers. It may or may not be something you can influence, but finding out if it is is what the VPN/DNS recommendations are for.

olivetho said:

1) blocks all requests for a specific asset if a session has requested it too many times in a row, and 2) doesn't have a cooldown system in place to allow said session to access the asset again after some time has passed.

Click to expand...

your guesses were all very reasonable, and that's what I checked for the people on discord, to no avail :/
also our rate-limit system does have a cooldown and a grace period both, to handle both bursts and clients that stop misbehaving... :/ also if you get caught, refreshing the page would show a very clear "you are a banned" for a couple of minutes

my best guess is one of:
a. ISP f*ckup of some kind (we use BGP and if their ISP is flapping routes a lot, when this should be every few hours at most, that will break established TCP connections)
b. Some kind of MITM system bug causing in-transit TLS checks to fail every now and then (you'd be surprised at how many ISPs run those, on top of people's local AVs also running bootleg ones)
c. Some reverse proxy bug on our end, though we use HAProxy, which isn't exactly uncommon, as Wikipedia and other similarly large websites also do (because it is reliable)

So at this point we're kind of stuck on the way investigating why, because the next step is looking at packet captures, which is obviously not feasible in our context