The timeout to SR is because its introduction nodes are being DDOSED by clients. Clients who have already established circuits to SR will be able to keep surfing it, but clients who need to connect to introduction nodes are incapable of establishing new circuits. This is why it appears to be down for some people during the same time period that it is obviously up for others. Changing to a new circuit will not help at all. tor-2.3.11-alpha has hidden services dynamically modify the number of introduction nodes they use based on the number of clients that connect to them. It is also bad for client anonymity when the introduction nodes go down, next time you can't get SR to load check your Tor circuits. If it is down for the reason I just mentioned and not actual server down time, you will notice that your client is building a fucking lot of circuits that all fail one after the other. It may build a hundred or more failed circuits in just a few minutes. This is because when introduction points are down Tor essentially treats them as a failed circuit and tries again and again to connect to them but they are still down. tor-2.3.11-alpha stops attempting to connect to introduction nodes after far fewer circuits. BTW this means that during periods when introduction nodes are down if you keep trying to connect to SR you are quickly going to be traceable to your entry guards, your client goes into hyper mode and builds way more circuits than it should be building. In essence your anonymity will be decreased to barely more than that of a hidden services. SR loads fine for me most of the time, but during certain times of day (obviously when a lot of people are trying to connect to it) it is frequently down. If you live in an uncommon time zone and are surfing SR while the majority of users are sleeping or working, you probably will not notice this as much.