Why is everyone's avatar broken on CAC?

[David at David Simpson Apps]

I can't see anyone's avatar on community.atlassian.com, instead the alt text is displayed.

Is this normal behaviour?

If I view the URL for an avatar image, e.g. 
https://api-private.atlassian.com/users/xxx:yyyy-dbfb-4f0c-a03e-zzzzzzzz/avatar?initials=public,

I see:

{"code":401,"message":"Unauthorized"}

This avatar is visible on other Atlassian products, but using a different. URL:

https://avatar-management--avatars.us-west-2.prod.public.atl-paas.net/xxx:yyyy-dbfb-4f0c-a03e-zzzzzzzz/fdsafdsa-7f19-432c-99d7-fdsfdsafdsafdsa/128

Is it just me? Am I special? Is there a fix? Are you aware that this is broken?

[Daniel Eads · Accepted solution]

Hey @David at David Simpson Apps  - we're aware of this particular issue and the underlying cause. If you happen to see this issue, you can resolve it by ensuring you're logged in to Atlassian Cloud (id.atlassian.com is a good place to check this). Once you're able to access Atlassian Cloud sites or your profile at id.atlassian.com, the avatars should load normally again on Community.

Cheers,
Daniel | Atlassian Support

[Dave Liao]

Hopefully the underlying issue is fixed one of these days... quality of life improvements are always appreciated! 💪

[David at David Simpson Apps]

Yeah, @Daniel Eads that didn’t work on my Mac/Chrome as I’m always logged into id.atlassian.com to use this and Jira Cloud etc. However everything is good on mobile Safari. You’ve got a weird bug there 🙃

[Daniel Eads]

The avatars are pulled from the identity service (or an anonymous one is shown if the logged-in user is not a member of the same organization, and that person has set their image to viewable by their organization only). Right now it's possible that the identity session may have ended - but the Community uses a separate session cookie. Therefore it's possible to be logged in on Community still while the identity service sees your requests for avatars as unauthorized. I hope that provides a little more guidance - if logging in at id.atlassian.com on the same browser session you're logged in to Community with doesn't seem to fix it, you could continue further by:

• Logging out of Community (the icon next to the notification tray in the top bar -> Log out). This should refresh your identity session with Community. You may need to do a hard refresh (shift + cmd + R or shift + F5) to bust the broken images in your cache.
• Completely clear your cookies/cache and log in again

This should only happen once per user and session - so once you've cleared the problem on your Mac, you should be set in Chrome going forward.

[David at David Simpson Apps]

It's not nice: