For over 36 hours, the popular darknet market – Empire Market – has remained offline. This is according to a range of sources, not least the researcher and analyst Dark.fail who has been tweeting about this blackout. Moreover, this subject has been attracting significant attention in various online forums, including the Reddit threat r/darknet and its deep web equivalent, Dread.
According to Dark.fail, the blackout is a result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. In other words, the server was bombarded with artificial traffic.
“Empire Market remains under a large DDoS attack making it very slow to access,” Dark.fail tweeted on August 21. “Monero functionality appears broken, Bitcoin is functioning according to multiple trusted sources. Always PGP verify URLs, many phishing links are circulating.”