For some additional context, loading photos on the website from you web browser is a result of a direct connection between your web browser and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and iNaturalist does not have any impact on that connection. We could obviously choose to use different a different provider or different services. But given that we are using AWS, loading photos is a direct connection between a user’s web browser and AWS and does not involve iNaturalist servers. In this case, it seems like AWS, or your Internet service provider, or somewhere in between, is having issues preventing the images from display, or causing them to display slowly.
Incidentally, the issues earlier today where for a couple minutes users may have seen messages related to the site being overloaded, were related to connection issues between iNaturalist servers an AWS during photo uploads. So I suspect there could be additional issues as AWS today related to both problems. Hopefully that gets cleared up and images load again soon.