some pieces missing from view

Some pieces are missing from view. No black king or rooks.

Now white pieces too!

I cleared my cache, now the entire board is gone. wtf?

Same here, no board anymore in Daily chess

Black bishops were missing for me. No idea what is going on.

Last night there was an issue with the content delivery network (CDN) the site uses to deliver static assets. It may be happening again today.

Thanks, but not really helpful. 

Ignorant to what a "static asset" is.

No response from Chess.com as to how/when it will be fixed.

Neither the squares nor the pieces are showing. Yesterday I played a game in which my opponent's knights were invisible.

This just happened to me opponents knights were not showing. My opponent would not agree to a draw so I lost rating points.

Images for example. The problem is that the CDN has servers all over the world and your images will load from the closest one to you. So a problem with one of the cache servers will only impact a subset of members.

I haven't received confirmation that is the issue, but it was last night and based on the symptoms and other topics, it appears to be. Unfortunately, staff may not know when it will be fixed or how many people are impacted due to the distributed configuration.

Normally it makes things load faster but when it breaks, then some people have problems.

One moment I thought it was a new variant

Yes, Martin_Stahl's description is likely accurate.  I experienced exact same problems all day on chess.com as others are describing, and until now.  When I start a new game, NO pieces have been displayed on the board for the past 16 hours.  I had to let the other player know and cancel my first two games EVER.  Chess.com, in trying to  save  server bandwidth, uses CDN to "cache" images like chess pieces that never change  in the "cloud"  so they don't have to be pulled from the chess.com servers.  CDN servers are located around the world, and so (when it's working as it should be) these chess.com images are on every single one of those servers in its cache so the cached images can be immediately supplied to a url request without pulling the images from chess.com servers.  With 50,000 games going on at once this can save a LOT of server requests and bandwidth.  I do the same with my own site, but I use an SF company called cloudflare.  Same concept, just store content in the cloud that doesn't change and pages can be instantly loaded like there are 1000 load balanced servers handling all the requests.  As long as the content caching  servers aren't having problems, it runs like a DREAM.  It makes small companies SEEM like they're much bigger company than they really are.  My site has lots of database and Google Map API content which is bandwidth intensive.  If my one server even TRIED to handle all the requests it would DIE.  If ever content caching fails, the site CAN switch to development mode which bypasses the cache and makes all requests pulled from the server, but we would experience ridiculously slow site performance on chess.com exactly like what would happen on my site.  It seems to me chess.com is big enough they should have a "back-up" content caching provider like cloudflare so if this kind of disaster happens, they can just re-point the chess.com DNS entries to the other backup provider (a 15 minute exercise), while they get it resolved with CDN. 

Martin/Frank,

Thanks for your very detailed answers. Unfortunately, Chess.com does not appear to be very responsive to their customers issues.

Moreover, I was forced to abandon several games due to this issue and am now relegated to the "poor sport" pool. Horrendous customer care. 

Yes, the one challenge I see them having is responsiveness to their many thousands of "paying customers."  Perhaps from running lean and mean OR not having a clue what to do when content caching fails, and no one available to even post site maintenance messages and whats being done to address the problems and provide ETAs for when they expect things to be resolved. 

I DO think that Chess.com should REMOVE any complaints submitted related to poor sportsmanship that were submitted during the hours that their site is not delivering the content as agreed under their terms of service.  I HOPE by telling my playing opponents of the problem that occurred that I did not receive one.  There is NO reason to even start a game on chess.com until they get someone to help them resolve this mess.

Hi. Thanks for the detailed explanation....but, for static images like chess pieces, wouldn't each user's browser cache these?  Also, a little while after experiencing the non-display of the board, I played a blitz game against a BOT in which the bot was taking typically 3 seconds to move compared with the usual instantaneous responses.

The question is why to we need to post these questions to a forum in the hope some other user can explain what is happening? And at best, other users may only be able to provide a possible explanation, but they cannot offer solutions.

Where the hell are the Chess.com administrators???

Given the number of paid users this is a $1M+ revenue business. They should be able to afford minimal customer support!

The site does have customer support but they are answering tickets. Staff do check the forums but that is not the primary support channel so this category is mostly answered by normal members.

The browsers first attempt would be to check local images. But almost all content has a time to live where it will refresh from the source.