New Yorker site: Only with Firefox; what gives?

Factual Questions
1

It’s possible that this situation is temporary, and may clear up or change before anyone answers, but I’m curious what might be going on.

I can reach www.newyorker.com or newyorker.com or http://newyorker.com using Firefox with no problems. No, I don’t think it is being cached locally, and I can navigate many pages at that site with no errors.

Each of the New Yorker URLs causes a “Aw, Snap!” error in Chrome.

Each of the New Yorker URLs causes a “…cannot open the Internet site…” in IE 6.

I cannot ping or tracert newyorker.com (205.217.104.30), getting timeout errors.

I can ping or tracert www.newyorker.com (198.47.108.74) with zero loss, 27ms time.

All of these tests are being performed thru the same Internet cable connection on a PC running XP SP2.

What gives? Why is Firefox the only browser that can get through?

2

I just opened the site with safari on my iPad although it asked me to rotate my device (wtf?)

3

What does “rotate a device” mean? Do a pirouette?

4

Maybe it means to change your display from portrait (vertical) to landscape (horizontal) for better formatting?

5

I can open the site in FF, IE 11 and Chrome, but in the latter two it popped up a video ad overlay a second or so after loading. I have Flashblock running in FF, so presumably that is what stopped it there.

I am guessing yo have Adblock of Flashblock running in Firefox, and maybe your Flash needs updating for the other two browsers. (The ad can actually be closed quite easily, and it seems to be muted by default, so it is merely obnoxious rather than truly evil.)

6

Firefox is notorious for its DNS cache. It’s likely that FF cached an IP address for newyorker.com that happened to work; the other browsers and tools, behaving correctly, did not.

That site appears to use an edge cache, which should mean that it effectively has many IPs and traffic is routed to the nearest cache. But I think something might not quite be configured correctly on their side.