Usually feels like
Open-ended
Nothing in the mechanism sets a ceiling, so no honest band exists.
Nothing inside this wait counts down, and the only party who knows what happened is the one that has stopped speaking.
The wait, in plain words
The address does not answer. Not slowly, not half way, not with a gate screen holding you at the door. The request goes out and nothing comes back, and the same thing happens on the other string in the panel above. Where the earlier bands describe screens that are still doing something, this card begins where the screen has stopped doing anything at all.
This site does not monitor anything. It contacts no service, keeps no record of what opened and what did not, and holds no opinion about the state of any market, including the one it is about. The two strings are printed as they were supplied and nothing further is claimed about them. So this card cannot tell you whether a market is gone. It can only describe the shape of the wait you are in when it might be.
That shape is unusual because it has no ceiling. A ceiling would need somebody with both the knowledge and the obligation to say when the wait is over. The only party with the knowledge is the one that has stopped speaking, and it was never under any obligation to speak in the first place.
Underneath, while nothing moves
An onion address is not a place on a map. It is a key, and reaching it depends on a small record being published to a directory by the service itself, and on your client finding that record and building a path to whatever sits behind it. Every link in that chain can fail on its own. What your client hands back to you is a report about the lookup and the path, not a report about the service.
That is why the view from outside is so poor. The failure text is generated by your own software, out of its own failure to complete a step. It carries no information about why the far end is not there, because your software never reached the far end to ask it.
| What happened at the far end | What the outside sees |
|---|---|
| The operators shut the service down deliberately and moved on. | A lookup that finds nothing. |
| A machine failed, or a hosting arrangement ended without notice. | A lookup that finds nothing. |
| The service was taken over, or taken away, by someone else. | A lookup that finds nothing, or a page that behaves oddly. |
| The service is being flooded and is refusing almost everything. | Long stalls, and often a lookup that finds nothing. |
| The operators are rebuilding and intend to return. | A lookup that finds nothing. |
Read the right hand column again. Most of those rows produce an identical result, and the rest produce it often enough that you cannot sort them by looking. The distinctions matter enormously and are invisible from where you are standing, and they stay invisible for as long as the far end prefers. An operator who intends to come back has no reason to announce an outage in advance. An operator who does not intend to come back has every reason to say nothing at all.
Announcements, where they exist, arrive after the fact and through channels this site does not carry and cannot vouch for. Waiting for one is not a plan.
Behaving, and not behaving
A silence that has lasted an evening and a silence that has lasted longer than you can remember are not different in kind. They are different in what they should do to your behaviour.
A silence that is still ordinary
One address is quiet and the other opens. Or both go quiet and then one returns in the way an address coming back describes, without explanation, as though nothing had happened. The pattern is patchy, and the gaps are not getting longer.
Sessions that do get through look normal. Nothing you left behind has changed state in a way you did not expect.
A silence that has outlived its explanations
Every address you have is quiet, and has been quiet across attempts on different evenings, on different circuits, from a client you have restarted. The quiet is uniform rather than patchy.
Or something answers, and what answers is subtly not the same: a sign in that used to work does not, a layout has changed in ways nobody mentioned, a request appears for something that was never asked for before.
The right hand column is not proof of anything. It is the point at which continuing to treat the situation as a temporary outage starts to cost you, because you are still holding whatever you would move if you believed it was over.
Notice that the right hand column includes a case where the address does answer. Coming back is not the same as coming back the same. A returning service that asks you for something new is a change of circumstances, not the end of your wait.
Safe to do meanwhile
The useful work in this wait is all on your side, and none of it needs the far end. It is mostly writing things down while you still remember them, and reducing the number of things that depend on a service returning.
- Write down what you had thereOrder references, threads you would want to reconstruct, anything you have not stored elsewhere. Memory of this fades faster than the outage lasts.
- Read the strings again, character by characterIf you have been typing from memory, or from a note made in a hurry, the fault may be at your end and not at theirs.
- Learn what a return actually looks likeSo that a return is not mistaken for something else, and something else is not mistaken for a return.
- Stop the checking from becoming the activityAn interval you set in advance beats opening the same tab whenever the thought arrives.
What makes it longer
Nothing you do shortens this wait. Several things make it feel longer than it is, and one or two genuinely extend the period in which you cannot tell what happened.
- Checking more often. The interval between attempts has no effect on the far end and a large effect on you.
- Treating a rumour as a finding. Accounts from elsewhere arrive faster than facts do and are indistinguishable from guesses at the moment they arrive.
- Trying new strings collected in a hurry. A silence you understand is better than an answer from something you cannot place.
- Deciding the quiet means the worst, and then acting on that reading in ways you cannot undo.
- Deciding the quiet means nothing, and leaving something in place you would have moved if you had believed it.
What this card is not. This card is not a status report, and nothing on this site is watching whether any address answers.