Again, it isn't the async stuff. It is:

<script src="http://server.not.responding.com></script>;

That causes the browser to block waiting for a response.

It was a couple months ago, but I think it was olark19 not responding.

While I appreciate what you guys are doing a lot, I'm not willing to be a beta tester for your networking. Stuff like that absolutely needs to be hosted on an architecture that just doesn't go down. Ever.

Many browsers support an async/defer attribute on script tags now, which will cause them to load without blocking.

As far as I can tell, the olark js block we are asked to copy into the page doesn't set this on the script element that is pushed into the dom.