June 2026 — network-wide congestion

Summary. For several days in June, onion services across the entire Tor network resolved slowly or intermittently. Zion mirrors were affected in the same way as every other onion service. The market backend itself never went offline.

What happened

The Tor network periodically absorbs denial-of-service pressure aimed at onion services and directory authorities. During this window, guard relays reported failing a large share of circuit builds, and clients saw long delays fetching service descriptors. The effect is indiscriminate: it slows the reachability of every hidden service at once, regardless of how healthy the service's own server is.

What it looked like

• Mirrors opened on the second or third attempt rather than the first.
• Latency medians roughly doubled for a few days, then returned to baseline.
• Clearnet browsing over the same Tor client was also slower, a tell-tale of a network cause.

What resolved it

Nothing on the market side needed changing, because nothing on the market side was broken. As the network absorbed the load and fresh consensus documents propagated, circuit success rates recovered and latency fell back to normal. The lesson for visitors: when every onion you try is slow at once, the problem is upstream of any single site.

Last reviewed 2026-06-24.