Screenshot: Wordle
As a fairly enthusiastic — if not very expert — Wordle player, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea that The New York Times was adding the word game to its quiver. But I understood why the Times would want it, and why the game’s creator would want to not have to deal with its unexpected popularity. So I heaved a sigh, and prepared to continue to play on the new site.
The day came: I clicked on the familiar powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle URL and saw www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html in the address field. I mentally shrugged, and prepared for my morning battle with the English language.
And — nothing.
A blank screen. No 404 notice, no “your internet connection is loused up” message — and especially, no Wordle. Just a blank screen.
Where’s my Wordle?
Frustrated, but unwilling to spend too much time trying to figure it out, I got rid of the tab and tried again. No luck.
Was Wordle somehow down? No — I was able to access it on my Pixel 6 phone, on an incognito browser, and on Safari (which I hardly ever use). And nobody else here at The Verge seemed to be complaining. So I put it down to a glitch, and played on my phone instead.
But for the next couple of days, the same thing kept happening. It was as though the fates — or maybe The Verge’s IT department — had decreed that I should not be playing word games on my work computer. But this computer was where my previous Wordle statistics, as pitiful as they were, were kept. I was in despair.
Until I finally rose from my despondency, took a deep breath, and started searching for a solution. And finally found it in Reddit.
It turned out I wasn’t the only one. There were others who were finding that they suddenly could not access their morning Wordle fix. The problem?
They were New York Times subscribers.
It turns out that, for at least a few of us who actually subscribe to the Times, Wordle has an issue with the cookies that the newspaper leaves on our browser. (And it’s not just Chrome — there were complaints from people using Firefox and Safari.) The solution was to get rid of all the cookies the Times left on your browser.
In case you’ve also been experiencing this frustrating problem, here’s how to do that in Chrome. (If you use a different browser, you should be able to find the solution by doing a quick search.)
Click on the three dots in the upper right corner
Go to Settings > Security and Privacy > Cookies and other site data > See all cookies and site data
In the upper right will be a search field. Type in “nytimes”
Click on “Remove All Shown”
That should do it. It did it for me — after that, I went to the powerlanguage URL, clicked it, and found myself at my familiar Wordle site (albeit with the new NY Times address), along with my stats.
And once again, I can start my mornings enjoying coffee, toast, and Wordle. Well, sort of enjoying — I haven’t been able to solve the game in less than four lines for about a week now…