When it will not load

The most common diagnosis for "Black Ops is down" is wrong, because it is the easiest. The market is fine. The route is not.

What "down" is not

One failed connection is not evidence. Tor builds a fresh route through three relays on every click, and the onion service has to meet you somewhere along it. Any one of those relays being slow, congested, or filtered by your network is enough to kill the load while the market runs normally for everyone on a different route.

This is also why no honest source publishes an "online" badge next to an address. A check from one machine, on one circuit, at one moment, says something about that circuit. Your circuit is built fresh when you click, so the only test that counts is the load you are watching happen.

The order of operations

1. Wait it out. The first sixty to one hundred twenty seconds of a black screen and a spinning indicator is normal. Most "it is down" moments die here.
2. Build a new circuit. In the Tor Browser, the onion button next to the address, new circuit, then reload. Half the time this is the whole fix.
3. Take the next address. All three mirrors run the same market. If the front node for one is congested, the other two are not, and your account is on the other side of all of them.
4. Change networks. School, hotel, office, and airport Wi Fi are all famous for blocking or throttling Tor traffic. A phone on mobile data usually works where the desk does not. If that is the difference, the market was never down; the building was.

How to know it is really down

The market announces outages and maintenance on its Dread board, /d/BlackOps, as signed posts. That is the primary source, and it is where the address change lands too, when one happens.

No post, all three addresses failing on two different networks, and a friend on a different continent loading the market without trouble: that is a combination worth sitting with. Before you believe any "the market has moved" message that arrives at exactly this moment, run the fake mirror checklist. Outages are the favorite cover story, because a frustrated user does not check the address carefully.

Still stuck after all four steps? The Dread board's support thread is where operators see the pattern you cannot, and a PGP message to support goes to a person, not a form. If the problem is the browser itself, the setup page covers the usual suspects.