Network news, not market news
A large share of what people experience as a market being broken is the Tor network having a bad week.
This desk covers the network layer, which is a different subject from the platforms running on it and gets confused with them constantly. The confusion matters because the two have different causes, different durations, and completely different correct responses.
Things that break for everyone at once
Consensus problems. Directory authorities rebuild a shared view of the network on a schedule. When that process has trouble, clients get an inconsistent picture and hidden services become intermittently unreachable across the board. Nothing service specific will help and nothing service specific caused it.
Relay churn. Large numbers of relays entering or leaving in a short window shifts load onto whatever remains. Latency rises everywhere and circuit build failures increase. Usually resolves as the network settles.
Directory system load. The part of the network handling descriptor lookups is a small set of machines relative to the traffic. When it is stressed, the symptom is a service that cannot be found rather than one that refuses connections, and the two feel identical to a user.
Client version drift. Occasionally an old client stops interoperating cleanly with a network that has moved on. The symptom is that one person has problems nobody else has, which reads like a local fault and is not.
Telling network from market
| Other onions also failing | Network. Nothing about the market is involved and no address will help. |
|---|---|
| Other onions fine, all mirrors down | Shared to the platform. Genuine, usually short. |
| Other onions fine, one mirror down | That address specifically. Switch and carry on. The most common case by a wide margin. |
| Everything slow, nothing failing | Congestion. Not an outage, and reloading makes it worse. |
That first check, whether unrelated onion services are reachable, costs about fifteen seconds and settles the question that most reports to this desk are really asking. It is the single most useful diagnostic available to a reader and almost nobody runs it before concluding something.
Why it looks like the market
Because the market is what you were trying to reach. Attribution follows attention, and nobody notices the network working. A user hitting a network problem while opening a market experiences a market problem, and there is nothing in the error to suggest otherwise. Tor deliberately gives clients very little information about why something failed, since detailed failure information is useful to attackers, and the cost of that design is that ordinary users cannot tell these cases apart without checking.
Where to look
Tor Project status resources describe the network layer directly and have no stake in any platform running on it. Consulting them during an outage is faster than any amount of forum reading, and it answers a question forums are structurally bad at answering, since a forum will always produce someone confidently asserting the market is gone.
Verified working Nexus Market mirrors
Three v3 onion addresses currently serving the production market, signed under PGP fingerprint 0x7F2A0A9D. Use the Copy buttons.