If you're playing one of our games with daily content you may sometimes see an error message which says something like:


Astraware Crosswords has encountered a problem starting the puzzle. If you are attempting to play a Daily Puzzle please ensure you have an active network connection to receive the puzzle data.



 Games that currently have daily puzzles include Astraware Crosswords, Mahjong, Sudoku, Codewords, Word Search, Kriss Kross, Number Cross and any more that we add 


 The error message may look like this:






The puzzles are distributed from our server (which is physically hosted by Amazon using the same hardware that they use to provide their own store!).


When you start up the game (for the first time in a day), the game will try to make a network connection and ask for any available puzzles.


If there's a problem of any kind getting the message back, then the game will put up this error message.


Here are the possible reasons why you might get the message:


  1. Your device is in 'airplane' mode, and so has data connections turned off
  2. Your device is out of range of the WiFi signal (if you're using WiFi) or has poor cell coverage (if you're using a 3G or GPRS connection)
  3. You may not have the right login details for your WiFi channel
  4. Your WiFi router may not be working
  5. Your Internet Connection may be down or intermittent
  6. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) could have a problem
  7. There could be a problem between your ISP and the Amazon servers
  8. The server providing the Astraware puzzles at Amazon is having a problem
  9. Our software running on the server has run into a problem
  10. Our server has run out of puzzles for that particular game
  11. There's a bug in the game and something has gone quite wrong!


So which one is it?


The most common of these by far is 1 or 2 - your device isn't currently connected to an active WiFi signal.  The rest are all possible, but much less common.  

It's quite hard for the game to know which of these is the issue, which is why the game puts up the same message.

Usually a problem which isn't within your control will get fixed by someone else very quickly, and so we suggest to try again in a couple of hours.

You can check quickly for 1 to 7 by bringing up a Web Browser on your device, and putting in www.amazon.com - if that brings up a web page (full of tempting products, you must resist! resist!) then you know that you have a good working internet connection and that you have a connection all the way through to the right servers.  If you can't reach that page then Astraware can't help with it directly (usually asking whoever provides your WiFi will be the best choice!)  

You can check which of 8, 9 or 10 it is by going to http://cs.astraware.com/    (note the CS bit! It's not our usual web server)

Here's what it should look like if everything is working fine:


Our Sudoku server also provides the Mahjong puzzles, and our Crossword puzzle server also provides the puzzles out for Codewords, Kriss Kross, Word Search, and Number Cross.

If the problem is 8 (the server is having a problem) then you will likely see a 404 (page not found) error.

If the problem is 9 (some of our software is having a problem) then some of those services may switch from saying Live to saying Offline .


The problem hasn't resolved in a couple of hours


If the problem is 10 - the services are saying "Live" but the puzzles aren't coming through, them please let us know with a message to support!  We try to keep the puzzle "hoppers" full with a good number of puzzles in advance, but it's not unknown for human error to mean that one or other of us didn't properly load them in. (We do our best, but we have been known to make mistakes!)

 

Lastly, there's a very small chance that it's 11 - something else strange has happened!  We've come across this before with people in edge-case time-zones who are travelling to a different time-zone and resetting their device while playing the game at midnight at their local time when the clocks are changing for daylight savings. Our games have suffered bugs from time to time, and we try to fix them whenever we see them.  If this happens to you, the best way to check is by waiting a few hours and trying again. If you can also check on another device (if a friend has a similar device, for instance) that will help to rule out whether it's a problem with the version on your device.


If you can contact us in the case of a problem that you are fairly sure is something we can help with, that would be great, and we'll aim to resolve it as quickly as possible!