Can't access friends!

Hi @blueridge
We warmly welcome you to the Friendly King Community's Candy Crush Saga forum.🤗

You have playing this game through the browser on the Kingdom platform. In fact it is an old platform and there is no new features updated in the game. And King is not working on that platform. In the old game, The ticket was prevalent for unlocking episodes. But in the present, These options are not active in game. But it still available on old kingdom platform. Not only you, There all kingdom platform user facing this problem. 
Anyway, We heard there was some problem that you described.And we already reported it. But we have no information about when this problem can be solved.
During this time you can sync the game with Facebook and play on a more advanced platform. Your Booster and Levels will remain the same.

Of course, you can play the game of laptops through the Facebook platform.

And that's it! Your progress will be synced across both your King and Facebook accounts.