Description
To prevent new issues about this being opened every other day, I'm pinning this issue and will keep it open.
⚠️ Before you complain about this problem, read this post entirely! ⚠️
The Alex or Steve skins are the fallback skins that show up when crafatar doesn't have any other skin. There are numerous reasons that can cause this to happen:
- The requested UUID doesn't have any other skin (or didn't have any other skin when crafatar last checked)
- The Mojang servers are down, are returning errors, or are too slow to respond
- There are any kind of network issues between crafatar.com and Mojang servers
- The crafatar.com server is under very high load and ran out of resources
All of these happen frequently. Major issues on Mojang's servers show up on crafatar.com (you can also check the status here), but usually there are smaller, temporary issues that aren't publicly announced. Since crafatar.com is used by some of the largest MC networks and thousands of smaller websites and tools, it receives tens of millions of requests every day and server resources are a problem sometimes. Usually the server runs out of disk space because too many skins are cached. There are cleanup jobs in place to prevent this, but sometimes they fail due to the high load on the server or because more new skins are being requested than deleted. It's all a bit more complicated than it sounds, but I'll spare you the details. In any case, these are temporary issues that are automatically fixed with the next run of the cleanup job.
Please note that once a Steve or Alex skin has been served, it might be cached by your web browser and/or our CDN (Cloudflare) and you might still see those skins although the problems on the server side are no longer present. To check if this is the case you may, for testing purposes only, append a random request parameter to the URL.
If you are still seeing this issue and want to report it, please follow these steps:
- Take note of the URL you requested and the response headers
- Wait for at least 12 hours for the problem to go away
- If the problem still exists after 12 hours, take note of the URL and response headers again
- Post both URLs and their response headers as a comment in this issue, formatted as code blocks.
If you don't know how to view response headers, note that crafatar is probably not meant for you. However you can use this online tool.