Status / When a market is down
Market won't load — down, or just your circuit?
Most "the market is dead" panics are a Tor circuit problem, not an exit. Here is how to tell the difference in under a minute before you assume the worst.
First: rule out your own connection
A failed onion load looks identical whether the market is offline or your circuit picked a bad relay. Before anything else, build a fresh circuit (New Circuit for this Site in Tor Browser) and retry. If a second address for the same market loads while the first does not, the market is up — the first node was just unlucky.
Check more than one address
This is why the mirror lists on each market page matter. Markets with several onions — Torzon, Mars and Vortex — almost never go fully dark at once. If every address times out across two fresh circuits, that is a real signal. A single address failing is not.
Signs it is the market, not you
- Every listed mirror fails on multiple fresh circuits, over several minutes.
- The onion loads but shows an error page, a DDoS splash, or a "be right back" notice — that is the market talking, and usually temporary.
- The hub link also routes you away from that market to the live board.
Signs it is you
- One address fails but another for the same market loads fine.
- A fresh circuit fixes it instantly.
- Everything on Tor is slow, not just this one market — your guard relay or connection is the bottleneck.
If it is genuinely down
Give it time before writing it off. Reindexing and DDoS mitigation routinely take a market offline for hours without it being an exit. We move such markets to Rechecking on the status board rather than declaring them gone, and the hub keeps routing to whatever is live. Check back a cycle later before assuming the worst.