A couple of months ago I hard-configured two entry nodes that I trust for my own browsing. Both are very fast, very reliable nodes on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
For about 20 minutes this evening the 'tor' daemon appears to have lost connectivity to the both nodes and I could not browse via Tor. Quite a few instances of this message were logged:
Jan 30 22:59:06 Tor[]: Failed to find node for hop 0 of our path. Discarding this circuit.
Neither of the configured guards were restarted during the outage, and they are located in diverse networks. The BGP looking-glass routes are different except for the first hop, which is a massive AS aggregation presumably for a trans-Atlantic cable operated by AS1299 (Telianet). I presume that this "cable" is actually a fully redundant load-balanced set of cables and any outage would be measured in milliseconds, or at most two or three seconds.
Looking now, I see roughly 200 occurrences of the above message on Jan 14, 26 and 30.
The reason I hard-coded the guard nodes was that, after extending the guard lifetime to 18 months, the guards were changing fairly often anyway. This bothered me.
So the slightly paranoid side of my personality wonders if this is the result of a determined effort by one of the various spooky organizations out there purposefully disrupting Tor connections with the intent of forcing guard reassignment, naturally with the idea that Tor users might end up selecting guard nodes controlled by same said spooky organizations.
Thoughts, comments and sharing of similar experiences are all welcome.