NM-014: Outage response and risk posture

1. Posture

An outage costs patience. It does not cost money. Every documented loss connected to an outage comes from the reaction to it rather than the outage itself, which makes doing nothing the strongest available response in most cases.

2. Permitted actions

• Rebuild the circuit and retry
• Try another address from a set held before the outage began
• Wait and retry later
• Check whether other onion services are reachable, to classify the failure

3. Prohibited actions

• Searching for a replacement address, which is the origin of most credential losses
• Accepting an address from a message, comment or announcement that appeared during the outage
• Entering credentials on any page that has not passed the login screen verification
• Sending funds to any address published as an emergency alternative

4. Standing measures

Two measures make an outage inconsequential in advance. Hold a verified address set before you need one, so a failure produces an alternative rather than a search. And hold no balance on the market beyond the current order, so that even a permanent outage costs you nothing but access.

5. Distinguishing a permanent ending

A market ending is preceded by a recognisable pattern rather than by silence alone. Withdrawals slowing while deposits continue, support going quiet over weeks, established vendors leaving together, signed communication stopping while the site remains up. None of that is inferable from an address being unreachable for a day, and the standing measures above make the distinction unnecessary for your own exposure.