Chapter 1 of 6 / nothing loads
Nothing loads
The most common chapter and the one with the highest ratio of harmless causes to real ones. Almost everything here is the route rather than the destination, and almost everything here is fixed by waiting or by rebuilding a circuit.
What are you seeing
- The page just hangsA spinner, then nothing. Usually the route rather than the site.
- The browser says the address is invalidAn error before any connection is made. Almost always the string.
- One address opens and the others will notNormal, and more useful as information than as a problem.
- It worked yesterday and does not todayUsually retirement. The reverse case is the one to worry about.
- Everything is painfully slowLoads, but takes forever. Almost never the destination.
Before you work through any of them
Two things settle a surprising share of this chapter and take about a minute between them.
- Build a new circuit and try once more. A dying route produces failures that look exactly like a site being down. This is the single most effective thing on the page.
- Try a different address from the set. Failing on one and working on another points at that address rather than at your setup, and it splits the whole chapter in half.
The one thing not to do during an outage
Do not go looking for a new address while something is not loading. That is the moment helpful links appear, and the timing is the point rather than a coincidence. Collect addresses on ordinary days, compare them calmly, and keep the set in a file you control.
How often it is actually the market
| What it turns out to be | How often | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Your circuit or your connection | Most of the time | Try again, then rebuild the circuit |
| That one address being busy or retired | Often | Try another from the set |
| A genuine outage on the far side | Sometimes, and it can last days | Wait. Nothing else helps |
| A typo or a wrong address | Less often than people think, but it happens | Paste and compare, do not read |
| The market having ended | Rare, and impossible to tell from an outage on day one | Wait longer before concluding it |
The last row is worth sitting with. On the day it happens, a market that has ended and a market having a bad week look identical from outside, and anyone telling you which it is on day one is guessing.
How long to wait before concluding anything
| How long it has been down | What it means |
|---|---|
| Minutes | Nothing. This is the normal texture of a hidden service |
| An hour | Still nothing. Try another address and leave it |
| A day | Worth checking whether your set is current, and nothing else |
| Several days | A real outage. There is still no action available to you |
| Weeks, with nothing anywhere | Now the question is worth asking, and nobody can answer it for you |
People compress that scale badly. An outage measured in hours gets treated as an ending, and by the time it would actually be evidence of one, most readers have already acted on the assumption and moved money somewhere on the strength of a helpful message.