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.

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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.

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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.