Usually feels like
An evening
You put the machine down and come back to it the same day.
A string that has been quiet for a few minutes is usually your circuit. One still quiet at bedtime is an evening, and one still quiet tomorrow belongs to a market that has not come back.
The wait, in plain words
An address stops answering. The browser tries, thinks about it, and hands you an error page, or something worse: a page that half arrives and then stalls. You try again and get the same thing in the same amount of time. Nothing on that screen tells you what broke.
There is almost no difference between trying now and trying in a minute. There is a real difference between trying now and trying after the machine has been off for the evening, because the causes that clear on their own clear on a timescale closer to a whole session than to a page load.
This site prints the strings it was given and does not open them. It is therefore in no position to tell you whether either one is answering as you read this, and any page that claims to know that about any address is claiming something it also cannot know.
Underneath, while nothing moves
Several layers stand between you and a service on this network, and when one of them fails they all produce roughly the same silence. Your path, your client, the service itself, and the wider network in between.
| What might have stopped | What it looks like from your side |
|---|---|
| Your path | A circuit has gone stale or a relay in it dropped out. Common, dull, and usually self correcting. Building another circuit is the whole of the fix. |
| Your client | The software has lost its view of the network, or has been running long enough to be working from a tired directory. A restart handles it, and it is not a fix anyone should be proud of. |
| The service | The machine behind the address is off, overloaded, or down on purpose. Nothing on your side moves this at all. |
| The wider network | Directory trouble, a route problem, pressure somewhere upstream. Everything feels slow and several unrelated addresses fail at once. |
The reason to notice that these look the same is that people diagnose anyway. They decide it must be the market, and then they act on that decision. The action is almost always to go looking for a new address, and that is the moment the evening turns expensive.
When you are hunting for a replacement string you are the easiest you will ever be to hand a bad one. You are in a hurry, you have already concluded the old one is dead, and you will take an address from a place you would not normally consider because it is the only place offering one. A string that arrives while you are frustrated deserves less trust than one that arrived while you were calm, not more.
The published set does change from time to time, and when it does it changes on the market's own schedule and is announced through the market's own channels. That is the published set changing, and it lives a band further out. It does not happen between two page loads because you needed it to.
Behaving, and not behaving
The useful split here is not between working and broken. It is between a silence that still has explanations available and a silence that has run out of them.
A silence with somewhere left to go
Only one of the strings you hold is failing and another opens. Whatever is wrong, it is not the whole service and it is not the whole network, and you have a way in while it lasts.
Or everything fails, including addresses that have nothing to do with this market. That points at your side or at the network, and it clears without anybody doing anything about it in particular.
A silence that has run out of explanations
Every string you hold fails, unrelated onion addresses open normally, and this has survived a fresh client and a night of sleep.
Even here the honest reading is not that anything is gone. It is that you have exhausted the checks a person can make from a chair. That is the doorway to a market that has not come back, where no band applies and none is offered.
The order of operations that costs least is dull. Try the other string once. Then leave. Then try again later tonight, and once in the morning. If the cause was your circuit or your client, sleep fixed it for free. If the cause was the service, nothing you did tonight would have counted.
Keep the strings you already hold somewhere you can read them without searching. The addresses this site was given are printed plainly and identically on every page here, which is deliberate. An address you can reread is an address you are less likely to replace under pressure.
Safe to do meanwhile
Do the cheap things, then stop. The stopping is the part people leave out.
- Try the other string onceOne failing while the other opens is real information, and it costs a single attempt to get.
- Read the string character by characterA quiet address and a mistyped address produce exactly the same error page.
- Build a fresh circuit, onceOnce. Doing it over and over is watching rather than checking.
- Do not go looking for a new address tonightThe search itself is the risk. Nothing collected in this state has earned any trust.
What makes it longer
Some of these lengthen the outage. The rest only lengthen your evening, and it is worth keeping the two apart.
- A congested or filtered connection where you are, which makes every attempt slower and every failure harder to read.
- A client left running for a very long time, holding on to a stale view of the network it will not refresh on its own.
- Trouble on the wider network, which no single service can fix and which ends when it ends.
- Retrying in a tight loop, which can get you throttled and teaches you nothing you did not already know after the second attempt.
- Deciding early that the market is gone, which turns a maybe into a search, and a search into a bad address.
What this card is not. This card does not know whether any address is answering, has never opened one, and will never tell you that a string is up or down.
Questions people ask about this wait
Does a failing address mean the market is gone?
No. From your side a stale circuit, a tired client, a busy service and network trouble all produce the same silence, and the first two are by a distance the most common.
Should I look for a new address when one stops working?
Not on the same evening. A replacement collected while you are frustrated is the least trustworthy kind there is, and the published set changes on the market's schedule rather than on yours.