When the address will not open

A page that does not load is a message, and on this market the message is almost never what it sounds like. "The market is down" is the explanation people reach for first, because it is dramatic, and it is also the least likely one. In practice the failures below, in this order, cover nearly everything. Work down the list; the first match is usually the cause.

1. A "Did you mean ..." page or a DNS error

The browser never even tried the address, because the address as typed does not exist in its form. A character is wrong, missing, or an extra space rode in with the paste. The fix is mechanical: delete the field, copy the address again with the button, paste, enter. Then do the last-six-character check against the highlighted tail, because if the error comes back, the same character is wrong in your copy source, and that source should lose its trust.

2. ERR_TIMED_OUT or ERR_HOST_NOT_REACHED

The browser tried and the route died. In Tor, the route is a chain of three relays picked when the page was requested, and chains die: a relay goes quiet, a network blip breaks the chain, the circuit simply expires. Wait a minute and press the reload. Tor Browser builds a fresh circuit for the retry, and a fresh circuit is usually a different road. If two or three honest retries fail, open the next entry address: the three routes are independent, and it is normal for one to be bad while the others are fine.

3. It worked last week, and now nothing works

Before touching the address, suspect the network you are sitting on. Some public Wi-Fi networks block the ports Tor needs, and a blocked port looks exactly like a dead market: timeouts on every .onion, not just this one. The test costs nothing: open any other .onion site you have visited before. If that one fails too, the network is the problem, and moving to mobile data usually resolves it. If the other .onion loads and only the market fails, go back to the list and keep reading.

4. The page loads, but takes forever

This is not a failure at all. Tor routes every request in three hops, the market meters its entry through a queue, and the storefront itself is not built for speed. A minute from blank tab to first pixel is a good day. Do not judge the market by load time, and do not abandon a slow page that is slowly arriving; half-loaded pages abandoned at the wrong moment are how people conclude an address is dead.

5. Stuck in the queue, or the captcha keeps timing out

A queue that runs past ten minutes is one of two things: the market is genuinely busy, or the circuit under the queue is half-dead. You cannot tell them apart from inside the queue, which is why the move is the same for both: leave the tab alone, open a second entry address in a new tab, and let the two race. The captcha timing out is a slower cousin of the same story: the picture loads slowly, the timer runs anyway, the picture resets. On a weak line, this is normal. The queue, explained

6. All three addresses, correct spelling, working Tor, and still nothing

Now, and only now, is it time to consider that the market itself is unavailable: a restart, a maintenance window, or an address rotation in progress. There is no clearnet dashboard that says otherwise, and anyone who tells you with certainty that the market is "online right now" is looking at something that is not the market. The honest test is time: close everything, come back in an hour, try the first address. If an hour of patience fixes it, it was never an address problem. If a day does not, a new set of addresses is the usual outcome of a rotation, and the check for one is the same as always: how to tell a real address from a copy.