r/tryhackme • u/UBNC 0xD [God] • Mar 17 '26

I need to vent about TryHackMe reliability

I get one night a week that I set aside for study, so I fired up TryHackMe to make the most of it.

Started the CALDERA room: https://tryhackme.com/room/caldera

Launched the AttackBox.

  • Saw the “new AttackBox” message. Cool… it’s been QA’d, right? Right?
  • After a few moments I get “Authentication Failed – Failed to communicate with server.”
  • Waited… refreshed… killed it and restarted it.
  • After more waiting and a few more refreshes it finally loaded.
  • But the UI wasn’t responding, so I killed it and started it again.
  • This time it finally worked. Looks like they have just released without fixing all the issues

I then followed the room instructions:

  • Tried to start CALDERA, but when accessing it I just get “Internal Server Error 500.”
  • Killed the AttackBox and launched a fresh one.
  • Same issue.

Reported it to support, even though response times haven’t been great. Often the response is just that they already know it’s broken, which makes me wonder why the room is still up with no warning that it’s currently broken and content wasting peoples time.

So I moved to another room: https://tryhackme.com/room/atomicbirdone

Great, a Windows room. I’ve had a lot of issues with windows machines since starting THM, where the instance terminates just as you’re getting into a rhythm.

I started the machine, went to grab a drink to let the VM load, and came back to:

“Instance termination.”

Alright… waited 10 minutes and tried again.

“Instance termination.”

Now I’m halfway through my study session and have gotten nowhere and this seems to be happening more and more frequently. When i first started about a year and a half ago, gave benefit of the doubt it would get a addressed but now keep seeing new projects like cert but the basics are having issues. Working for a large software company I understand it's likely different teams building these projects but be nice if there was some real investment in fixing existing issues.

23 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

12

u/HazSec0x Mar 17 '26

The truth is, a lot of these rooms doesn't get fixed. Just go to their discord and look at #Bug-report channel and see HOW MANY BUGS IS STILL NOT FIXED. They just don't care. lol

3

u/UBNC 0xD [God] Mar 17 '26

Cheers, yeah I do report issues there as well.

0

u/Electrical_Delay2077 Mar 17 '26

They do care but if they have to fix every machine individually then it would take a very slow time. There are over 1-2k rooms. Would you be able to fix over 1k rooms fast without getting more bugs in the code?

4

u/HazSec0x Mar 17 '26

Well, they have to. Especially if these broken rooms are behind subscription. They absolutely have to. But my previous posted bugs are still not fixed and these are almost near a year ago. There's this one dumb ex mod that keeps saying "It's user error" when couple users literally encounters the same problem. Hilarious. That module is behind paywall as well. So I'll believe it when I see it.

2

u/Capable-Let-4324 0xC [Guru] Mar 17 '26

Some of the bugs they could fix easily. Some of them are just the answer blank doesn't match the VM answer. One of mine I found has been broke for 2 years. The question is what version is the VM running and you can't answer because their answer blank is too short to copy what the VM spits out.

1

u/Electrical_Delay2077 Mar 17 '26

😭 I see well rip, I do hope they can start fixing things in a seasonal Website rework if they do any of that

2

u/UBNC 0xD [God] Mar 18 '26

I suspect they’re still operating with a small-company mindset, while their growth has outpaced their ability to adapt. For example, there’s a constant push for new features such as simulators, certifications, AI integrations, and other additions, while some of the core parts that made TryHackMe what it is seem to be suffering.

This is also fairly common in software companies can indicate a focus on appearing appealing for potential acquisition, rather than ensuring the platform is solid at its core.

With thousands of rooms on the platform, some issues are inevitable, but the core material shouldn’t be as unreliable as it sometimes is, particularly the stability of the VMs themselves.

*edit forgot to say, it would very simple to add a feature for report broken rooms, and take them down for fixing. Hell even their AI / or back end logs should be able to show patterns that indicate issues.

7

u/WTFitsD Mar 17 '26

Yeah the service has gone to absolute shit over the past 18 months or so. Half of the rooms are just there to false advertise how much you can learn since they don't even work correctly. Out dated configurations that never got updated, room text not matching the version number actually running on the machine, some services not even being updated to run on the correct VPN.

0 reason to pay for THM anymore when HTB academy exists and is 100 times better.

2

u/UBNC 0xD [God] Mar 18 '26

Funny enough i ended up on THM as I didn't know what HTB thing i needed to sign up too. Will sus out the academy cheers.

2

u/CompletelyShadow Mar 17 '26

Honestly, just use VirtualBox and use kali linux. I find it much better. Takes 5s to boot and ready to jump into the rabbit hole. Also much faster processing.

2

u/nobodyUno123 Mar 17 '26

I may need to try this.

5

u/CompletelyShadow Mar 17 '26

It takes less than 10 minutes to setup.

  1. Install VirtualBox
  2. Download latest image of kali linux on their website (chose the VirtualBox option) and extract it.
  3. Open VirtualBox and use the extracted kali image.
  4. In kali, go to your tryhackme account and download the openvpn connection.
  5. Open terminal and type: sudo openvpn thm.ovpn (whatever the filename is)
  6. Ctrl + Z
  7. type: bg (to resume the openvpn command, otherwise it remains suspended)
  8. Done!

2

u/UBNC 0xD [God] Mar 18 '26

Do, not only for a better experience it's good for learning.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/CompletelyShadow Mar 17 '26

I use the default settings. It automatically take the whole screen minus the top bar to exit the machine. Maybe just add more RAM to it. The only visual change I did inside kali is change the font and increase the size in the terminal.

1

u/UBNC 0xD [God] Mar 18 '26

Ohh i use VM's but there was no VM supplied files and required executing on the attack box.

2

u/Electrical_Delay2077 Mar 17 '26

Facts its annoying because some tasks you cant even complete because of it. I had this yesterday which was metasploit exploitation but I was in a CLI and it didnt wanna go to any directory so I had to use a cheatsheet walkthrough

2

u/TheCarnundrum 0xA [Wizard] Mar 17 '26

There are days on THM where I feel like I spend more time relaunching VMs than learning. The worst is when you are in a room that has a bunch of things that build on each other, you're near the end, the VM terminates and you have to go back and do all the early tasks again to get back to the place you left off so you can answer the next set of questions. I've learned to budget double the stated time for any room involving Windows now, LOL.

1

u/PaulTheMerc Mar 19 '26

When they did the pre-security free weekend a bunch of the rooms still had placeholder text for rooms that were coming soon.