Is it up right now?

What "down" means over Tor

On the ordinary web a site has one address at one place, and a machine anywhere can ask that place whether it answers. An onion service does not work that way. There is no place to ask. Your client picks a handful of relays, builds a path through them, meets the service at a rendezvous point it chose, and that whole arrangement is thrown away and rebuilt the next time. Two people opening the same onion in the same minute are using different relays, different rendezvous points, and different luck.

So "down" is not a property the market has. It is a property of the path your client just built. A mirror that refused one path thirty seconds ago will very often answer yours immediately, and the reverse happens just as often. That is not a fault in Tor, it is what anonymity costs.

Why the badge on the other page is worth nothing

• A percentage describes somebody else. A figure like "99.2%" is one machine, on its own circuits, over some window it does not name. Your circuits are not its circuits, and the number was never about you.
• A green dot is already stale. Even if the check behind it were real, a snapshot of a rotating set of mirrors is out of date within the time it takes you to read it. Green when you loaded the page means nothing when you click.
• A last-checked timestamp implies a check nobody can run. The onions do not answer the clearnet. A clearnet server that claims a timestamp against them is describing something other than what it says.
• An outage graph is the same thing in nicer packaging. A chart of points that were never measured is still a chart of points that were never measured, and it reads as certainty, which is what makes it worse than nothing.

Use this as a filter. When a directory prints an uptime percentage for an onion from a clearnet server, it has told you something useful about itself, just not the thing it meant to.

The routine that actually answers it

1. Try all three, not one. The addresses at the top of this page are equal doors. Copy the first, paste it into Tor Browser, wait. If it stalls, do not sit on it: go to the second, then the third. Most of what people call an outage is one address refusing one path.

2. Force a new circuit before you conclude anything. In Tor Browser, "New Tor Circuit for this Site" throws away the path and builds another. A stubborn address often opens on the second or third path. Give it two or three tries before you decide the address is the problem.

3. Test something unrelated. Open any onion you already know works. If that one also fails, the problem is your Tor connection, not the market, and the fix is on the Tor setup page rather than here.

4. Check the tail before you sign in. If an address does open, that is the moment for the check, not before. The last characters in the address bar must match the string you copied, character for character. A clone that loads instantly is still a clone.

Run all four and you have the answer for the only observer that matters. It takes about three minutes and it is more reliable than any widget, because it is measured on the connection you are actually using.

Down, or gone for good

The two look identical for the first hour and then separate. A bad night is one or two addresses refusing while another opens, or all three stalling on your connection while other onions also stall. A retirement is different: the address returns the same "onion site cannot be reached" from several fresh circuits, over hours, while unrelated onions load normally, and the market's own channels start carrying a new string.

The mistake that costs people money is treating hour one as hour ten and going looking for a replacement address in a hurry. That hurry is exactly what a clone is built to catch. If everything here has stopped answering, the order is: wait, retry on new circuits, then look for a new string in the market's own channels, and verify it with the checks on the clone page before it gets your password. Never in the other order.

When somebody says it is down

"BlackOps is down" posted on a forum is one person's circuit at one moment, repeated by people who did not check. It is worth exactly as much as your own attempt, and your own attempt takes three minutes. When the claim is real it does not stay a rumour for long, because the market's own channels carry the new addresses and the story stops being a rumour and becomes a string you can verify.

The one honest sentence on availability is this: the market runs, the market has bad nights, and the only way to know which one you are in is to open one of the addresses at the top of this page.