Nothing loads at all
The most reported problem and the one least often caused by what people assume.
What is actually failing
Reaching a hidden service is a chain of things that can each fail quietly, and every one of them produces the same blank result. Tor deliberately tells clients very little about why something failed, since detailed failure information is useful to attackers, so you cannot see which link broke.
| Cause | How common | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| A dead or slow circuit | Very common | A new circuit. Seconds, and it resolves a large share of these. |
| That one address | Common | Another door. Flooding and descriptor problems are per address. |
| Descriptor publishing | Common | Nothing. It resolves on its own, usually within the hour. |
| Tor network conditions | Occasional | Nothing. Affects every onion service at once. |
| The platform | Least common | Nothing. Genuine and usually short. |
In order
- New circuit. In Tor Browser this is in the site information panel.
- Try the other two doors from the list at the top of this page.
- Open an unrelated onion service. This splits network from platform.
- Stop and wait. Ten minutes, then an hour. Most incidents are over inside a couple of hours.
How long before it means something
Hours mean nothing. An address unreachable for an afternoon is having an ordinary bad day and the overwhelming majority of these resolve on their own.
Days mean something. An address unreachable for a week while the others work normally has probably been retired, and the correct response is to delete it rather than keep trying. All three unreachable for days with nothing signed anywhere is the only shape that justifies real concern, and almost nobody waits long enough to distinguish it.
The dangerous version is an address that was dead for a long stretch and starts answering again. That is not a recovery. See the address for why nothing retired comes back under the same string.