ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE in Chrome when accessing META websites (Facebook, Instagram etc)

[old_n07]

Hi,

 

I realise that most folks here are school based and need to block the majority of Meta sites but incase you need to access them and are having the issue with Chrome returning an ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE error and you use Fortigate firewalls this might help.

 

The error is related to new features released with Chrome v119 that enables the use of "zstd" in the Accept-Encoding request header, and support for decompressing zstd-compressed web content. Fortigate firewalls do not currently support this method according to the community post below. Strangely this error does not currently manifest itself in Edge browser.

 

Disabling the feature in Chrome and restarting the browser does fix the issue, this can be done via GPO or in the registry for one or two machines - you will need the policy files from 119 or later in your repository for the GPO method.

 

Fortinet community post

 

Google Policy documentation

 

The GPO setting to disable is located under User Config \ Policies \ Administrative Templates \ Google \ Google Chrome \ Network Settings \ Enable zstd content-encoding support

 

HTH someone

 

Neil

[georgeescott]

We've started seeing this in MS Edge 122.0.2365.92 this week.

At the time of writing, their latest ADMX policies haven't yet added Chrome's equivalent of 'Enable zstd content-encoding support'.

However, you can set the relevant registry key to disable it until they add it to their ADMX policies:

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge]
"ZstdContentEncodingEnabled"=dword:00000000