How to Fix Your NY Times-Based Wordle If It's Not Working

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 wanted it, and why the game's creators wouldn't want to deal with its unexpected popularity. So I let out a sigh, and agreed to continue playing on the new site.

The day has come: I clicked on the familiar powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle URL and saw www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html in the address field. I blushed mentally, and got ready for my morning battle with the English language.

Nothing else.

a blank screen. No 404 notices, no "Your internet connection is bad" message - and notably, no Wordle. Just a blank screen.

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 Wordley down somehow? No — I was able to access it on my Pixel 6 phone, in an incognito browser, and on Safari (which I rarely use). And no one else here on The Verge was complaining. So I messed it up, and played on my phone instead.

But this cycle continued like this for the next two days. It was as if fate — or perhaps The Verge's IT department — had decided that I shouldn't be playing word games on my work computer. But this computer was where my previous Wordle stats, pathetic as it was, were kept. I was in despair.

Until I finally woke up from my despair, took a deep breath and started looking for solutions. And finally found it on Reddit.

It turns out I wasn't alone. There were others who were finding that they suddenly could not recover their morning verbally. Trouble?

He was a New York Times subscriber.

It turns out that, for at least some of us who actually subscribe to the Times, Wordle has a problem with the cookies that the newspaper leaves on our browsers. (And it's not just Chrome - there were complaints from people who used Firefox and Safari.) The solution was to let The Times get rid of all the cookies it left on your browser.

If you are also facing this frustrating problem, here is how to do it in Chrome. (If you use a different browser, you should be able to find a solution by doing a quick search.)

Click on the three dots in the upper right corner

Go to Settings > Security & Privacy > Cookies & Other Site Data > View All Cookies and Site Data

On the top right there will be a search field. type "nighttimes"

Click "Delete All Shown"

What should he do? This did it for me - after that, I went to the powerlanguage URL, clicked on it, and found myself on my familiar Wordle site (albeit with a new NY Times address) with my stats.

And once again, I can start my morning enjoying coffee, toast, and wordle. Well, having fun - I haven't been able to solve the game in less than four lines for almost a week now...