I am new to drupal, and am trying to help a friend with their drupal site, even though I specialize in Wordpress. i did some research on this and found results saying that by changing the permisions to 777 it would fix the issue. I did that, and it still hasn't fixed it... I'm at a total loss as I havn't changed anything yet and it was working a few weeks ago
You may need to recursively set the permissions on the files directory to 777, since the ctools cache directory is deeper inside there.
chmod -R 777 {files}, where {files} is the path to your files directory. Also, you may need to use sudo before that if your server allows it.