Chapter 1 of 6 / nothing loads
The page just hangs
It does not error, it does not refuse, it just sits there and eventually gives up. This is the most common single observation on the whole site, and it is also the one with the mildest explanation most of the time.
Reading time about three minutes. Nothing on this page requires installing anything.
What it usually turns out to be
| Cause | How often | What settles it |
|---|---|---|
| A slow or dying circuit | Very common | Rebuild the circuit and try once. This alone fixes most of them |
| The address being under load | Common | Wait a few minutes, or try another address from the set |
| A genuine outage | Occasional | Nothing to do. Hours to days is normal |
| Your own network interfering | Uncommon | Try from a different connection if you have one |
| A wrong address that happens to be unused | Uncommon | Paste it next to your saved copy and compare |
How to tell which one you have
- Other onion services also hang. That points at your route, not at Nexus.
- One address hangs and another opens. That points at the address.
- Every address hangs and other sites are fine. That points at the far side.
- It hangs for a few seconds then loads. That is a hidden service being normal, not a problem.
Slow is the normal state here
Hidden services are slow by design. Traffic goes through several relays in both directions, and a page that takes twenty seconds is not a warning sign. Anything noticeably faster than usual is worth a second thought rather than relief, because a copied page carries no load and runs no defences.
What to do, in order
- Wait thirty seconds. Not a joke. A lot of these resolve on their own and reloading resets the clock.
- Build a new circuit for the site and try once more.
- Try another address from the set. One working and another not is useful information rather than a nuisance.
- Restart the browser, which clears the circuits it was holding.
- Then leave it for an hour. Past this point you are repeating yourself, and repeating gets you rate limited.
What not to do
Do not reload in a loop. Every attempt asks for new circuits and the far side is already busy, so a fast cycle of reloads makes your own situation worse and does nothing for anybody else. And do not go searching for an alternative address, which is covered under the second chapter for reasons that have nothing to do with the outage.
What a rebuilt circuit actually does
Your connection takes a path through several relays, and they are volunteers with ordinary machines and ordinary bandwidth. One slow or overloaded relay in that path makes everything after it slow, and there is nothing about the arrangement that notices and reroutes on your behalf. Rebuilding picks a new path, which is why it fixes so much and why it costs nothing to try twice.
It also explains why the same address can be unusable for you and fine for somebody else at the same moment. You are not reaching it the same way.