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I posted a question yesterday, Output characters to Word document with different formatting for each character. When I tried to edit it I was told that Stack Overflow was in read-only mode. It is still saying that today.

There are two links at the top, one to the status page and one to recent meta posts on the topic. Neither of them says that there is any problem.

There have been multiple reports in the comments and on other meta sites that this problem keeps happening to various users ever since the initial report (and likely there have been more incidents that were not reported at all), hence the close reason that it “can no longer be reproduced” is invalid.

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  • 4
    (I suspect your requests aren’t making it to Stack Overflow servers, and the issue is isolated to you - or possibly other people near you or routing the same way. You could be getting served a cached version of the page from your ISP or a CDN or…)
    – user1502910
    Commented May 15 at 0:03
  • 4
    Try clearing cookies (and maybe other cached data) in your browser. Can you access it with a different browser? FWIW, I'm also in Sydney.
    – PM 2Ring
    Commented May 15 at 2:27
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    This has happened to several people over the last few months (including me). I suspect it has something to do with Stack Exchange's Cloudflare settings. I'm curious about what triggers it. IIRC, it happened to me when I had a busy Physics.SE question page open in my phone browser overnight. But that could just be a coincidence.
    – PM 2Ring
    Commented May 15 at 7:23
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    Been happening to me for about 12 hours on math.SE.com. BTW: are the links in the read-only banner to the SE.com status and SE.com meta or are they properly specialized to the stack where they appear? For me, instead of to a math.SE status and meta.math.SE, they're to the SE.com status and meta. Reported here
    – Eric Towers
    Commented Jun 22 at 15:06
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    Report of the same issue happening on RPG.
    – Thomas Markov
    Commented Jun 23 at 8:22
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    Another report from Mathoverflow.
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jul 5 at 8:54
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    And now it happened to myself; added to the linked meta.MO post.
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jul 25 at 6:48
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    Another possible instance: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401510/… , though this differs from all other reports here in that the issue fixed itself after several hours without the user having done anything.
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jul 25 at 8:47
  • 2
    as of 15:01 25 July 24 Mozilla Firefox snap for Ubuntu 128.0.2 (64-bit) Ask Ubuntu in read only since early morning but photography ok
    – dmkonlinux
    Commented Jul 25 at 14:02
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    Looks like they have acknowledged (and fixed) the issue: stackstatus.net/incidents/f1490159-6b45-4b27-8a2b-cbcc1eaa05b1
    – user1502910
    Commented Jul 25 at 17:47
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    The next report: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401833/…
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jul 31 at 11:54

3 Answers 3

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Clearing cache and cookies (Chrome) fixed it, thanks.

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  • I'm curious what would have happened if you had tried to access any URL on the network (other than that one question) that your browser hadn't cached...
    – user1502910
    Commented May 16 at 22:27
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    @testing-ma-lady When it happened to me, all of my other sites on the network behaved normally, only Physics.SE was in read-only mode.
    – PM 2Ring
    Commented May 17 at 6:09
  • When it happened to me, clearing cookies and data initially had no effect; it only worked on the second try about a half day later.
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jul 25 at 6:56
  • Another weird thing is that the issue is somehow tied to the user account as it affected both devices I use to access the site at the same time, nevertheless I had to clear cookies on each device separately to fix it.
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Jul 25 at 11:47
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    Clearing my cache worked for me, but only briefly. I again have no access to MathOverflow. Clearing my cache a second time had no effect.
    – JDH
    Commented Jul 25 at 14:35
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In Firefox, what worked for me is clicking the "lock" icon on the left of the address bar, and pressing Clear cookies and site data.

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  • Reposting my answer from here, since that got closed as a dupe of this one.
    – HolyBlackCat
    Commented Sep 20 at 8:52
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FYI - I've added the status-review tag to the post. The team is aware and discovered what's causing this during last night's maintenance (see here and here). No estimated timeline, but it is on the team's radar for investigation into a fix for it.

In the meantime, as @pmolsen mentioned above, clearing cache and cookies is the current suggested workaround.

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