Empire Market, a major darknet marketplace for buying and selling illicit goods, has been offline for over 48 hours as of press time. Customers have begun to raise concerns about whether a distributed denial-of-service attack is causing the site to stay offline — or if something bigger is afoot.
Twitter user Dark.fail, an anonymous journalist specializing in the Tor Project, suggested that the blackout “feels more stressful than [Empire market’s] frequent” downtime in 2019 when DDoS attacks kept the site offline for extended periods of time.