Habbo players aren't loading. Neither am I.

[1920]

Whenever I try to log in, and this has been going on for a few days now, the habbo players aren't loading for me.
Yesterday they weren't loading either, some were, and I would load to. My friends would load as well.

Today NO ONE loads and I won't load no matter how long I wait.

I did have a black screen issue a few days ago, but somehow that managed to fix itself.
Any idea on what I can do?

Btw; This is my first thread. I just started Habbox. c:

[Ajthedragon]

Mine's the same. I'll try deleting my cache now...

[Aaron]

Yeah, I've heard of this problem from a few friends.. perhaps contact customer support http://help.habbo.com

[Aaron]

And also, welcome to habbox!

[Ajthedragon]

Cleared my cache and works fine now, bit slow though....

[Red]

my groups haven't been loading at all. idk if anyone else has had this though

[Jordan]

Yeah no one's groups are loading atm, I'm guessing they are trying to fix it!

[PsychoLlama]

To anyone having this problem, are you connected to the internet through a router? If so, could you share your router information?

I've found Habbos will load if I connect directly to my modem or tether through my phone. I have the issue on five systems with disparate hardware and software configurations, though browsers and Flash (10.3.181.14) are up to date. The only aspect shared between the systems is the connection through my router.

Router info:
WRT54GL v1.1 with TomatoUSB firmware 1.28.8754 (primary router)
WRT54GS v5.0 with stock Linksys firmware 1.52.8 (a spare which when used didn't solve the problem)

[PsychoLlama]

Ignore the above post. If possible, could a mod delete it please?

Contrary to what I wrote in my previous post, the issue has nothing to do with routers. The reason I thought so is due to the fact by connecting through a router, every one of my systems was using it for DNS lookups, and I had the router itself set to use 4.2.2.1 (Level 3) as the primary server for lookups. Unfortunately this server returned an IP on Habbo's CDN which doesn't want to play nice. When connecting a system directly to the modem, it switched to my ISP's DNS servers, which returned a working IP on the CDN.

Habbo hosts much of its content, including textures for avatars, on the Limelight CDN. This allows them to serve content to users quickly in multiple geographically separate location.
The textures are hosted on images.habbo.com. This hostname points to sulake.vo.llnwd.net which in turn points to multiple IPs on Limelight's network.

I don't know every address of sulake.vo.llnwd.net, but for me (in the Midwest US) the following holds true:
208.111.168.6 - Textures display properly
208.111.168.7 - Textures display properly
208.111.161.254 - Textures do not display properly, most everyone is a ghost

I also am unsure if these IPs are particular to a certain region, or are anycast. If it's the former, using them may result in slow texture downloads.

And now, for fixing it.
First, on a command line run

ping images.habbo.com

and note the IP returned. This has no bearing upon fixing the issue... I just think it'd be nice if we could consolidate a list of non-working IPs.

For *nix and OS X users add the following to /etc/hosts
For Windows XP and above add the following to WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc/hosts

208.111.168.6 images.habbo.com

You can also use 208.111.168.7. The ping and traceroute/tracert commands could help you determine which one would be quicker for you.
A restart shouldn't be necessary to affect the change, but it couldn't hurt if the problem isn't resolved after saving the hosts file.

I cannot say with confidence my method of fixing it is permanent. If in the future you again experience an issue with textures, remove the line from your hosts file.