Recently, I discovered that my custom Facebook Like Box on my website was totally empty or blank, but only within all versions of Internet Explorer and still working fine in certain other browsers. (I run all my versions of Explorer in a virtualization environment.)
At first, I thought that I overlooked something in my code. After rearranging some code and inspecting the DOM, I still could not see any problems, but yet the Like Box remained invisible.
Then I thought that Facebook updated their Like Box code making mine obsolete, so I updated it to the latest version… still invisible.
Finally, I found a thread on StackOverflow that had the solution. Apparently, if you have any age or country restrictions on your Facebook Page, the Like Box will remain invisible unless you’re logged into Facebook in that particular browser. Sort of makes sense, since Facebook cannot validate your age or country unless you’re logged in.
The solution is simple, remove all age and country restrictions from your Facebook Page forcing the Like Box to always appear on your website.
It seems weird that they give you this tool, but yet there’s no graceful degradation for the very common situation where a visitor may not be logged into Facebook. Rather than breaking your website layout, it seems that they could have put a placeholder or some other generic content into the Like Box for any unauthenticated visitors.