Did you try exiting and re-entering the area? Was this from the Moss Grotto's Starting area? What did you do before exiting the area where the cage was?
but it seems that the problem is either limited to my work-pc (runs chrome, whereas my home-pc runs waterfox) or is a sporadic loading glitch that requires a full page reload to fix.
Does it trigger constantly, even if you restart the game or reload the web page? It seems that you're the only one experiencing this bug, maybe a browser problem? Are you playing on browser by any chance