I’m Iain Ball, the artist and creator behind the ENERGY⋮PANGEA: Legacy Archive collection, which I deployed via Manifold Studio. This is a series of 1-of-1 ERC-721 posters and editions preserving my 2010–2019 project exploring themes like resource extraction, techno-dependence, and speculative mysticism.
I’ve recently noticed a widespread issue where the Arweave-hosted media files for a large number of NFTs in this contract (internal ID: 157894896) are not loading properly on the Manifold mint pages and viewer. Instead, clicking the media links results in errors like “Error 502 Bad Gateway: CDN77 server is unable to reach website’s origin server” or similar timeouts (e.g., 503 Service Unavailable). This initially seemed intermittent—some files worked fine a day or two ago but are failing now and continue to be, and while a few in the contract still load occasionally, many are consistently affected. Other contracts I deployed in the same way are displaying without issues, so it appears isolated to this one.
The NFTs still show up fine on some marketplaces, but the media previews are broken there too in some cases. I’ve tried alternative Arweave gateways (e.g., ar.io, g8way.io) and these are also not working.
Has anyone else encountered similar Arweave gateway issues recently? Could this be related to a backlog in bundling/unbundling or a temporary network hiccup? I’d appreciate any insights or assistance in troubleshooting—perhaps checking your logs for this contract, forcing a metadata refresh, or coordinating with Arweave. Let me know if you require more details like additional token IDs or transaction hashes.
I noticed that this seems to be happening for the larger archival poster files in my contract;
Arweave appears to struggle with larger files at times, but they had been accessible for a while until recently.
Glad to hear that you are looking into this, and appreciate the suggestion, I will also check out Wayfinder. I am confident the files are still live on Arweave, but if gateways don’t load, this means collectors could lose confidence.
Update: I checked out Wayfinder, and all the files load and are accessible. The real issue is that if main arweave/metadata gateways don’t load on markets (or Manifold mint pages themselves) its still a problem, so hopefully the Arweave team can resolve this.
Please Let me know any updates or developments on this issue, and thanks again.
Hey Iain! Thank you so much for the report and checking Wayfinder to double check the data serves through any gateway for you. Glad to see the data is in fact on the chain, the only issues is that specific gateway/domain which is controlled by the Arweave Core Team.
A trivial issue, nothing to worry about!
We’re going to be making some updates over the next day (maybe the weekend if it takes longer) to ensure that all media display uses our own CDN, in order to ensure reliable delivery. We will also update all “See Full Size Media” links to use Wayfinder to find the best gateway before opening the media in a new tab, that way we ensure a reliable gateway is used with no 502s or region blocks.
Appreciate the patience while we get this done! Thank you again for bringing this to our attention, super important and this is affecting a few other members in the community as well.
No worries, and thanks so much for the fast reply and for jumping on this — really appreciate it!
Just to give you full context: I’m minting all my NFTs through Manifold Studio, uploading the bigger video/files via ArDrive, and embedding some Arweave images/videos directly on my personal website as well. So the 502 timeouts are hitting me in three places:
NFT mint pages / marketplaces
“View original” links
My own site embeds
Super glad to hear you’re rolling out the CDN fix + Wayfinder on the “See Full Size” links. That should solve it across the board for me and the other artists.
Let me know if you want any example TxIDs from my Manifold drops or ArDrive uploads to test with. Happy to help however I can.
Both are looking great now! Thank you so much for the patience here. Helped out the whole community with this report.
I’ve also made sure to add this feature to Edition/Claim pages as well. Tomorrow I’ll audit for other spots I can make this improvement.
Can you give me more information on what you’re using on your site and send me the site as well? I can then give you instructions on how to update, or if there are any updates even necessary on your end. Thanks!
And please let me know if you spot any other interfaces having this issue! I’ll patch em up right quick.
Thanks so much—I’ve just checked, and the Manifold pages for the ENERGY⋮PANGEA: Legacy Archive collection are now loading perfectly. Really appreciate the quick fix!
That said, I’m still running into a couple of related issues I’d love your help with if possible:
On some external viewers (e.g., Foundation’s mint page for many of the tokens), the media is still failing to load due to gateway timeouts.
This returns a 502 Bad Gateway error (CDN77 unable to reach the origin server). It seems intermittent or gateway-specific, as the same files work fine elsewhere now.
Separately (not directly Manifold-related), I’m using ArDrive for uploads, and some Arweave-hosted video embeds on my own site are timing out or failing to load. For instance, on this page: PHILIPS 2013 / Old Earth Objects (It’s part of the “PHILIPS 2013 / Old Earth Objects” series—mostly links to internal project content, but some of the embedded Arweave media, particulary video, there isn’t pulling through reliably.)
These feel like lingering Arweave gateway/CDN flakiness (possibly CDN77-related, based on the exact error wording). Have you seen similar reports recently, or is there a way to trigger a cache purge/refresh on the Arweave side for these specific transactions? Alternatively, any recommended workarounds like forcing alternative gateways in metadata or tools to test connectivity?
Thanks again for your support—it’s making a big difference!
The “www.arweave.net” gateway is undergoing some changes and maintenance by the arweave foundation. They run that gateway/domain as a non-profit public service, so it’s not always the best gateway.
We’ve been noticing some random files returning 502s during period, and we’ve been assured the foundation will eventually get this figured out in the next few weeks.
In the meantime it’s a trivial issue, as www.arweave.net is 100% replaceable with any of the gateways/domains ran by anybody in the Arweave network (just like with IPFS). Here’s a huge list of 600+ here
As for why our contracts return that specific domain, the ERC721 and ERC1155 token standards require a real browser-renderable URL to be returned so we have to pick one – the arweave foundation’s one seemed the best one-size-fits-all but it does not always work. That’s what the other gateways are for!
Hello Manifold, would you please consider using ar:// syntax for your URIs, to avoid depending on a single gateway that has recently failed a lot. This syntax makes it clear that it is up to the reading platform to either run an Arweave node or simply run through a list of gateways until one answers. Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks for the thoughtful message — really appreciate you raising this. Also good to see you in the forums! I recognize ya from CT.
You’re absolutely right that ar:// makes the storage layer explicit and avoids pointing to a single gateway. Philosophically, we agree that it clearly signals that resolution should happen at the platform level rather than depending on one specific HTTP endpoint.
That said, we currently use https://arweave.net/... in our contracts for ecosystem legacy compatibility reasons (for now). We do want to move to ar:// soon.
A few important points:
The metadata is still permanently stored on Arweave’s decentralized network.
While some platforms (like OpenSea and FND) support ar://, they currently resolve it by converting it back to https://arweave.net/... under the hood anyway. We don’t have the ability to force how third-party marketplaces to implement proper URI resolution with Wayfinder.
Many legacy platforms, wallets, and indexers still expect HTTPS URIs by default. Using HTTPS ensures our NFTs display reliably everywhere without additional integration work on their side.
We’re also aware of recent gateway reliability concerns.
Importantly, the content itself remains safely stored on Arweave regardless of any individual gateway’s uptime. Within all Manifold applications we now automatically find the best gateway for you using ar.io’s Wayfinder system as of last week.
Our priority is balancing long-term decentralization with practical compatibility and display reliability across the ecosystem today.
Wanted to do a follow up here – Is this related to your platform NFTimeless? Would love to know more about the use-case!
For the purpose of development and using Wayfinder, ar:// and arweave.net are documented as being treated the same by the Wayfinder system, though arweave.net is acknowledged as the legacy option. So we use it when we see either type of URL come through and you may want to consider the same.
