There's a bug in 0.3.0 and later that causes clients to fetch microdescriptors from fallbacks. So fallbacks (and authorities) will have extra load until that's fixed.
Makes sense. The relay can't keep up with the extra load. It's basically a DDoS. It's gone into this state 4 times over the past ~ 48 hours.
I think Tor LTS / 0.2.9 is in Debian stable: http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org/dists/stable/
I've opened a ticket to add LTS to the Debian repository instructions: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23897
I wouldn't recommend upgrading to 0.3.0 or later, there are stability issues on some clients, and maybe relays. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21969
Thanks the info. Unfortunately I upgraded to 0.3.1.7 before reading this (it didn't help), and can't figure out how to obtain 0.2.9.12 from the repos. I've tried these repos:
deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org trusty main deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org jessie main deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org stretch main
All of them seem to only offer 0.3.1.7, but I'm not sure I'm looking in the right places or querying apt in the right way.
A static link to a signed dpkg (for 0.2.9.12) would be fine for the moment, if anyone knows of one.
Thanks.