The Difference Between a Flood and a Seizure

When a market suddenly stops answering, the first question is whether it is a flood or a seizure, because the two look identical from the outside, a dead address, but they mean opposite things about the market's future.

A flood is a traffic attack. Someone points a lot of automated traffic at the market's address and overwhelms it, usually for a few hours or a day. The market is not gone, it is just buried under noise, and it comes back when the attack stops. Floods are common, they are cheap to launch, and a market that has survived several of them has shown it can take the hit. The tell that it is a flood is that the market's other channels, its forum posts, its announcements, are still active, saying the address is under attack and here is the backup to use.

A seizure is different, and rarer. A seizure is when the address itself is taken, usually because the operator's infrastructure was reached and the specific server or key behind that address was captured. A seized address does not come back, because the key that made it is no longer in the operator's hands. The tell that it is a seizure, when you can tell at all, is silence. The channels go quiet, or they announce a move to a new address, because the old one is not coming back.

The practical difference for you is in the response. If it is a flood, you wait, or you use a backup address, and you are back in the same market with the same account in a day or two. If it is a seizure, the address is gone for good and the market, if it survives, is at a new address, which means your saved link is dead and you need the new one from the market's own announcement. Either way the move is the same, go to the market's published list and use a current address, but knowing which one you are facing tells you whether to expect the old address back or to retire it for good.

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