One of the most frustrating parts of debugging isn’t always the bug itself—it’s when you can’t find a single working solution anywhere. That’s exactly what happened to me when JIRA avatars stopped showing in Chrome on my Mac.

Avatar Not Showing in JIRA

It's not a huge issue but it's so irritating and it affected my flow so much. I scoured the entire internet trying to find a solution but to no avail. Atlassian's own documentation? Useless. Community forums? A bunch of unanswered threads or people saying “same issue here.” It honestly felt like even the Atlassian team had no idea what was going on.

I also tried asking ChatGPT and Deepseek but nothing there either. Alas, after trying all the usual tricks and hitting a wall, I finally found a fix that worked—and it was surprisingly simple.

🧠 The Setup

  • Device: MacBook (latest macOS)
  • Browser: Chrome (latest version)
  • Issue: Avatars not showing on the JIRA board (but everything else loaded fine)
  • Tried:
    • Refreshing ✅
    • Clearing cache/cookies ✅
    • Chrome update ✅
    • Disabling extensions ✅
    • Incognito mode ✅
    • Shouting at my screen (also ✅)

Still nothing.

🎯 The Fix: DNS

Turns out, the culprit was DNS resolution.

Chrome was defaulting to the DNS provider to the one provided by OS and for some reason the avatar domains were not being resolved by it.

Default DNS Provider to OS

Once I manually changed the DNS provider in Chrome’s settings, avatars magically reappeared.

Here’s how you can try this fix:

🔧 Steps (Chrome on Mac)

  1. Open Chrome
  2. Go to: chrome://settings/security
  3. Scroll down to Advanced → Use secure DNS
  4. Enable it if not enabled already
  5. On Select DNS Provider dropdown, choose a known good one, like: Google or Cloudflare
  6. Refresh JIRA

Boom. Avatars back.

Avatars showing after DNS Provider Change

💬 Final Thoughts

It’s such a tiny bug, but man does it break your flow. If you’re stuck seeing blank faces on your JIRA board and nothing else works—give DNS a shot.