The outage window
More harm in this whole subject happens in this window than anywhere else, and the reason is timing rather than technique.
Why fakes cluster here
During normal operation, a claimed new address is easy to dismiss. You can compare it against the working ones, or simply go to the site and see. Both of those disappear the moment the real addresses stop answering.
So an outage removes the comparison, raises the demand, and produces a population of people who want a solution right now. A helpful address appearing in a thread at that moment looks like somebody being useful. Every property that makes an outage frustrating also makes it the ideal moment to seed a fake, and the people doing it are working to that schedule deliberately.
How an outage actually unfolds
| Elapsed | What you see | What is usually true |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 5 minutes | A page hangs | Indistinguishable from your own circuit being bad. Nobody has noticed anything yet. |
| 5 to 20 minutes | Retries fail, first posts asking if it is down | The problem is known and being characterised. Nothing useful can be said yet. |
| 30 minutes to hours | Speculation hardens, exit scam asserted, new addresses circulating | Usually fixed or close to it. The gap between reality and the narrative is widest here. |
| Resolution | Addresses answer again, often one before the others | Normal. Staggered recovery looks inconsistent from outside and is not a signal. |
What to do
- Build a new circuit. Costs seconds and resolves a large share of what gets reported as an outage.
- Try the other addresses. Second cheapest step, and it separates an address problem from a network problem immediately.
- Check whether other onion services work. One question that separates a market problem from a Tor problem, and almost nobody runs it.
- Then wait. Genuinely the highest value action available. Most incidents resolve within a couple of hours.
What not to do
- Do not go looking for a new address. This is the single most important line on the page. Anything you find during an outage was placed there for you to find.
- Do not reload repeatedly. Under congestion every reload adds load and pushes you toward a rate limiter, making your own situation worse.
- Do not read silence as a signal. Nothing being announced is the expected state of an incident, because the channels for announcing are the ones that are down.
- Do not open a dispute. A network outage has no effect on an escrow contract. A panicked dispute against a healthy order costs you more than waiting.
- Do not lower your security settings to make something load. It does not help and it removes protection at the worst possible moment.
If something does answer
Verify before typing anything, and be more suspicious than usual rather than relieved. An address that starts working during an outage is either the real one recovering, which needs no action from you, or something that was waiting for exactly this moment.
The one case that deserves genuine concern is days of silence across every address with nothing signed anywhere. Days, not hours. Duration is the discriminator and almost nobody waits long enough before deciding otherwise.