The local copies usually stick around a lot longer, I think 2-3 months. Perhaps the original poster ran out of storage, which triggered more aggressive purging?
nope. Have several gigs free. This is something else. The pictures all load when I'm in a dead cell spot, but the looping clips don't.
Interestingly, it all works fine and quickly in airplane mode. My theory is that before it plays the video, it checks settings to see whether it's online, and then makes a blocking call to a google server to, like, increment a view counter or something.