Electrum uses Electrum servers to interact with the bitcoin network. It uses them to find out which transactions are relevant to your wallet and also to broadcast spending transactions. The server you are connected to will see your addresses, transaction history and balances. It will not get access to your seed or your private keys.
Servers are run by volunteers so sometimes they go down. You may want to connect to a different server in these instances:
- It says “Not connected” in the status bar
- The orb icon in the bottom right of the Electrum window is red instead of green or blue. Red means Electrum is not connected to a server. Green means it is. Blue means it is connected to a server via a proxy. The orb changes to arrows when you are synchronizing with a server.
- Your transaction history and balances are not updating like they should.
In situations like these it’s a good idea to switch to a different server. Here is how you can do that:
- Click on the orb icon in the bottom right of the window or choose network from the tools menu
- Switch to the overview tab and uncheck “Select server automatically”. Then right click on a server in the list and choose “Use as server”.
- Click on close and then pay attention to the status bar. Electrum will sync with the new server you selected and hopefully start working properly. If it doesn’t then repeat the process with a different server.