diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
index 7bac3c97a08..0c555988e59 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
@@ -164,6 +164,9 @@ Release 2.7.1 - UNRELEASED
 
     HADOOP-11891. OsSecureRandom should lazily fill its reservoir (asuresh)
 
+    HADOOP-9658. SnappyCodec#checkNativeCodeLoaded may unexpectedly fail when
+    native code is not loaded. (Zhijie Shen via ozawa)
+
 Release 2.7.0 - 2015-04-20
 
   INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES
diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/io/compress/SnappyCodec.java b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/io/compress/SnappyCodec.java
index 8d2fa1a6fb4..2a9c5d0bc2a 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/io/compress/SnappyCodec.java
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/io/compress/SnappyCodec.java
@@ -60,7 +60,8 @@ public class SnappyCodec implements Configurable, CompressionCodec, DirectDecomp
    * Are the native snappy libraries loaded & initialized?
    */
   public static void checkNativeCodeLoaded() {
-      if (!NativeCodeLoader.buildSupportsSnappy()) {
+      if (!NativeCodeLoader.isNativeCodeLoaded() ||
+          !NativeCodeLoader.buildSupportsSnappy()) {
         throw new RuntimeException("native snappy library not available: " +
             "this version of libhadoop was built without " +
             "snappy support.");