I received a comment earlier on my post Requesting Onion Link Suggestions! in which the user said that he had been trying every link I posted on this site but kept receiving messages like “site unreachable” or “connection error.”
This could be happening for several reasons:
- You’re not connected to the Tor Network.
- The site is down permanently.
- The site is down temporarily and will come back up eventually.
- Tor is blocked in your country.
If you get a message like the following…
…then there’s a good chance that the site itself is down. This happens frequently on Tor, either because of a server error, or because the site is under a DDoS attack, or something similar.
On the other hand, if you can’t access any onion sites at all, this sounds to me like you’re not connected to Tor. If you’re just using the Tor Browser, it should tell you that you’re connected when you start it up. In the screenshot below (which I “stole” from the Tor Project), it’s illustrating how to use Tor bridge relays, which can help you connect if Tor is censored in your country.
On the other hand, if that’s not the case, it might be that you never connected in the first place, or as I said above, the site itself is down. So let’s try an experiment. When you first start up the Tor Browser (or its equivalent, like Orfox), if it’s connected properly, you should see a message like this:
In theory, if it’s connected, you should be able to access onion sites. Now, to verify that this is working here’s an onion site as an example: zlal32teyptf4tvi.onion (that’s Fresh Onions, the link list). If Tor is working, you shouldn’t have any problem getting to that site.
You can also try this one: xmh57jrzrnw6insl.onion/ – that’s the TORCH search engine. Last I checked, this one was working as well! It should look something like this:
If none of these links work for you, then my guess is that you’re not connected. Feel free to elaborate in the comments if it still isn’t working! (I’m curious as to what might be going on.)
