I checked the gallery this morning from my NTL circuit and have found everything to be in order – all the pictures appeared as I would expect.

Are these people surfing from work connections? There is newer filtering/censorship software about which not only bans certain sites but deprioritises external network traffic that is not classed as “business-critical”.
in simple terms its set up so that during times of heavy net traffic workers can get a fast connection to a suppliers’ website to order office equipment or production stock, but a non-work related (but relatively inoffensive) site like news (PV is usually classed as a media site by filters) is not blocked but gets a slower connection. Of course, the option to block sites altogether still remains

One symptom of a slow connection is the loss of graphics and their replacement by the “X” symbol; I believe browswers have always been coded like this as a throwback to the days when the internet operated over slow dial-up connections, had way less capacity, and most content was text – the idea is that if you can’t see the pics you could at least have read the text.

if they are surfing from home however, then its just a symptom that their ISP is pants and cannot cope with the customer data demand (sadly a lot of them are simply greedy and take on more customers than they can service).