Cases the network caused

Tor is a large machine made of volunteer parts. It works remarkably well and it fails in ways that are almost perfectly designed to be mistaken for something else.

The six cases here account for a very large share of what gets reported as a market being down. None of them involve the market at all, and in several of them the market never learns that anybody tried.

The six

• One unlucky path, and everything looked broken fixed in one second
• The lookup failed before the service was contacted nothing was ever reached
• The whole thing was slow, not the site general, not local
• It worked, then it did not, then it worked again ordinary churn
• Your own line is the thing standing in the way the one with a real fix
• The page arrived halfway and then stopped the expensive one

Why these are so easy to misread

Because none of them announce themselves. No error message names a relay. Nothing tells you a lookup failed rather than a service refusing. The browser reports what it can, which is that something did not arrive, and the wording of those messages leans towards describing the destination.

Meanwhile the destination is the only named thing in the whole picture. You typed an address for a market. When it does not work, the market is what the mind has to hold on to.

One minute of diagnosis

1. Request a new circuit for the site. If that fixes it, it was routing.
2. Try an unrelated onion service. If that is also broken, it is not about your destination.
3. Try an ordinary web page. If that fails too, it is your connection.
4. If everything else is fine and only this address fails, repeatedly, over hours, the case moves out of this section.

Nearly everybody skips this and goes straight to conclusions. It takes about a minute and it separates four possibilities that otherwise stay tangled for an evening.

What the network never does

• It does not block you by country. An onion service has no useful way to know where you are.
• It does not tell a service that you tried and failed. Failed attempts are invisible from the far end.
• It does not have maintenance windows, because there is nobody to schedule them.
• It does not give the same answer to two people at once. Reachability is a property of a path.

That last line is the reason this site publishes no status of any kind. There is no single fact about whether an address is up, so there is nothing honest to display.

Nobody is at fault in this section either

A distinction worth drawing. Assigning a failure to the network is not an accusation, because there is nobody to accuse. It means the cause sits in machinery that belongs to thousands of unrelated volunteers and is behaving as designed.

This is different from the section for things with no author, where there is no mechanism worth naming at all. Here there is one, it can be understood, and understanding it usually tells you what to do next. That is the reason these cases are separated out rather than filed under bad luck.

The practical difference is that network cases have a diagnostic and a remedy. Bad luck has neither.

• The published address list
• Why nothing here is monitored
• Every case in one table