What's happening?
Even though the steem data is stored on blockchain, the images are stored on Amazon AWS. Today the media server is experiencing some technical issues and we have no images on steemit.com.
Are there any alternatives?
There some other apps like chainbb and busy.org, but they wouldn't help for this issue as the images aren't stored on blockchain.
How to solve?
For now we have to wait while Steemit Inc will solve the issues with their Amazon instances. However, it proves that steem is vulnerable to a ddos attack to those servers, which would make steemit partially unavailable since lots of posts rely on images included there.
UPDATE: The issue is solved, though the suggestion above is still actual.
Obviously, we need the images also be stored on the blockchain or just transform them into blobs and include in the post's body. If you agree, please upvote and resteem for reach.
Like your post. Thank u for the information
Storing in the blockchain looks like a very intensive process (too big blocks, images repeated at all the miner´s computers,...)
Agree, but there are solutions like IPFS.
Maybe down the road when Steem is bigger, if Siacoin or Storj (or their successors) succeed at undercutting AWS in terms of cloud storage pricing in a way that facilitates hosting of content in addition to offsite backups, we could propose a stakeholder vote to have this blockchain contract directly with a distributed storage chain.
As far as DDoS protection goes, Amazon definitely needs to step up their game, considering they are still playing catch-up relative to the big names in the industry.