Someone said we should run a separate server to work as a load balancer and generate these captchas as they might consume processing from the server. We’ll look into it. Thanks!

Thanks! Yes, we are improving our firewall rules and this week we expect everything to be running smooth again.

Thanks, man!

Thanks, man!

Regarding 1, the attack has been going on for weeks, and now the attacker shifted to using mostly ToR exit nodes on the clearnet, so some users reported that it is not always that they can access the website when using exit nodes, sometimes they get blocked because of the rate limiting that is in place to fight off the DDoS. But we can see the attack on localhost as well (actually spamming on localhost), which indicates the attacker is also using onion connections to attack us. This is a fact. Some people from the community suggested we implemented some solutions on onion, and we are going to look into it this week.

Regarding 2, that’s exactly what is happening, as other services are also being affected see https://status.torproject.org/; As we said, we are a small team and we are working into solving all issues this week. We’ve been providing the community with good services for quite a while, and we hope to normalize the situation once we improve our defenses.

Network Performance Issues v3 Onion Services “We’ve been experiencing an unusually high load on the Tor network during the last couple of weeks, which impacts the performance of onion services and non-onion services traffic. We are currently investigating potential mitigations.”

We are just updating the community to let people know that services are disrupted right now, not working 100%. We need to be open about this otherwise users will complain asking why we did this or that, so we are just being transparent. We also need to let users know there are fake websites running because we have already seen some users lose money to these scams, so this is quite important. About what you also said, yes, many other onion websites are suffering attacks as well. I believe eXch was suffering DDoS too, among others.

We have not yet implemented PoW, as our team is small and we are trying to mitigate the attack on clearnet first, since most users come from there. But yes, some nice people already suggested this, and we’ll look into it this week.