To improve site speed and to protect your site from external attackers, Comcast Security has outfitted the cluster with two layers of static file caching. When end users visit your site, they're generally getting served static versions of assets, like documents, style sheets, and JavaScript snippets.
WordPress updates your site's origin cache every time you publish or update a post. Akamai updates the cache for a specific page whenever you publish or update it — and refreshes everything else on the site at least every 24 hours.
Occasionally, the origin cache and Akamai's cache fall out of sync right after a page update or a system update. When that happens, you may observe a page that loads text and videos but not in the standard layout, like this:
For most users, this situation resolves itself in under a minute, as the caching tools usually detect the error and self-heal.
However, for some users — especially logged-in site editors (with access that bypasses Akamai's cache) — a locally cached file may be "stuck" or a required CSS update may be missing. In both cases, some users may see this layout-less version of content.
To fix this issue whenever you see it, click the "Fix Layout Glitch — Clear CSS Cache" button appearing in the admin bar along the top of your WordPress editor screen.
That will resolve this issue nearly 99% of the time, as WordPress rebuilds its asset library with new timecode stamps that the Akamai CDN should honor.
In very rare cases where this does not resolve the issue, please submit a helpdesk ticket so our team can request a full-system cache flush from Akamai.
We are also working with Pagely and Akamai to build out an automated system that can detect and resolve these issues — but we wanted to make sure you had a tool to resolve and/or report these issues when you see them.