A dead address working again is good news
My address stopped working and now it works again, so everything is fine
Why this one is marked most damaging
Because every instinct says the opposite. Something was broken, now it works, and the natural reading is that it was fixed. Relief arrives before examination, and the page in front of you looks exactly like the one you remember, because it was copied from it.
It also reaches the wrong people. The readers most likely to have a long dead address saved are the ones who have used the platform longest, which is the group with the most confidence and the most to lose.
What is actually happening
Nobody takes over the exact string, because serving traffic at an address requires the private key it was derived from. What happens is a near miss: an address generated to match the recognisable opening characters, with the middle left to differ. Matching four or five opening characters takes minutes. Matching seven or eight takes days and is still practical. Matching all fifty six is impossible.
So the forgery is always the same shape, and the differing characters sit exactly where reading stops. Full detail on the mechanism is in the saved address claim.
Telling the situations apart
| What you see | What it is | Do |
|---|---|---|
| Down for hours, others fine, comes back | Ordinary outage or a bad circuit | Nothing. This is normal. |
| Down for days, others fine, stays down | Retired | Delete it from wherever you saved it. |
| Down for a long stretch, then answering | Somebody else | Close the tab. Do not type anything. |
| All addresses down, other onions fine | Something shared, usually short | Wait. |
| All down for days, nothing signed anywhere | The only shape that justifies concern | Wait longer before concluding. Days, not hours. |
The habit that prevents it
Delete rather than archive. An address kept for sentimental reasons or just in case is an address you might paste on a distracted evening months later. Compare what you hold against a published list every few weeks, which takes under a minute, and take the deletion seriously when something drops off. That single habit removes this entire failure.