The holding page that appears before the market, what it is doing, and why it occasionally refuses to let anybody through.
A holding page appears, runs a check, and hands you to the market. Most of the time it takes seconds and nobody thinks about it. When it sends you back to itself instead, the cause is almost always one of four things and none of them require a support ticket.
Hidden services get flooded, and the standard defence is to make every arrival wait or perform a small amount of work before entry. Passing the check hands you a token, and that token is what gets you through the door on the next request. Without the gate a burst of automated traffic takes the whole service off the network for everybody.
The token did not stick, because cookies or storage are blocked for that address, which makes every visit a first visit forever. Or the circuit changed between passing the gate and using the token, so it arrived from a different apparent visitor. Or you reloaded during the check, discarding a nearly finished pass and rejoining the queue at the back. Or the gate is simply saturated and shedding arrivals, which looks identical from your side.
Let one attempt run to completion without touching anything, even when it looks stuck. That alone clears most loops. Do not open the market in several tabs at once, because parallel attempts compete with each other for the same slot. If it still loops, request a new circuit for the site and make one clean attempt on the fresh path. If it loops on a new circuit too, another mirror has its own gate and its own queue.
Do not lower the browser security level to get past a gate, and do not install anything that offers to solve it for you. A gate is a two minute inconvenience. Both of those trade it for a permanent problem, and the second one puts your traffic through somebody you have no reason to trust.
A queue that holds you briefly is the reason the service is reachable at all during a flood. The alternative is not a faster site, it is no site. Treating the gate as a malfunction and hammering it is the behaviour it exists to absorb, and it makes the queue longer for you as well as everybody else.
Component states, the 90 day uptime history and the incident log live on the status dashboard. This page covers one question in depth rather than repeating the board.