When developing websites or visiting websites I'm seeing issues when pulling down files from various CDN. E.g. I just signed up to Shopify and on first load of the shop in Firefox it wouldn't pull down the files from http://cdn.shopify.com. Likewise visiting stackoverflow.com and other sites I have had the same issue with no response when downloading https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js.
I have experienced both these issues today using the latest Firefox 14 and Chrome 21. Sometimes just doing a refresh the file comes through fine, then refresh and again sometimes no response. Always with CDN files (separate domain).
My questions are:
- Is this an issue well known to other web developers?
- What causes CDN file requests to fail (outside of the server just being down or under load), is it a cross-domain issue?
- Are there any precautions we can take to prevent this, aside from hosting the files ourselves?