Weird thing for the past three days: I can’t read CNN articles on my iPhone.
If a CNN article comes up in my Google newsfeed and I click on it, it opens, but with a dark grey screen over it. I can see the picture and the headline, just barely, and if I scroll with my finger the article moves under the grey screen, but I can’t read it.
Anyone else with this problem?
I’ve re-booted the phone a couple of times, but to no effect.
It’s not an iPhone thing. I get the same issue when I go from Google News to CNN using Firefox–except I also get an error message I can barely read (black on dark gray). It seems to be CNN blocking Google’s “AMP” (accelerated mobile pages) service which displays the info inside a frame on Google.
It seems to be one of two possible misconfigurations. Either they changed a security policy and didn’t realize it would mess up AMP, or one or both parties are trying to disable using AMP but didn’t do so completely. Either way, you can’t read CNN anywhere Google forces its AMP service, and it has nothing to do with your iPhone.
I did find something that seems to be a workaround. When on the grayed out page, I used the address bar to go to a different page. Then, when I pushed back to get the original page, it loaded the same page at amp.cnn.com, and was not grayed out.
If that doesn’t work, another workaround seems to be to tap the share button on the top of the grayed out page, in the white bar that is not grayed out. I then chose to copy the URL, then pasted it into the address bar. This URL went directly to the CNN.com page, and thus showed the content.
Hopefully they just didn’t notice due to the holiday, and will get this fixed soon.
Thanks for the explanation. Interesting workarounds, but sound like work. If CNN doesn’t want me to read them, that’s their problem.
Like I said, it’s almost certainly a misconfiguration, either on CNN’s side or on the Google News side.
Also, did you click the reply button on my post (not for the thread in general) to reply to me? I didn’t get a notification.
No, I wasn’t quoting you.
This has been happening to me, but I just reload the page and it clears it right up.
Thanks for that suggestion; tried it, thanks. But it reloaded in clear for just a few seconds, then went dark grey again.
Still can’t read CNN.
I’ve always seen this when I’ve used up my allocation of free articles, but that always comes up along with a pop-up message box saying so. So, not sure if you’re seeing the same sort of thing.
The usual fix seems to be delete all your cookies. (That’s always the first knee-jerk troubleshooting step anyway.)
Im getting a weird situation with IMBD where the page isnt loading because it wants to first do a digital handshake with m.media-amazon.com. Maybe these are hacking attempts.
CNN doesnt charge as far as I know.