Transactions – How do I know the identity of the Bitcoin network?

There is really no such thing as “congestion” in Bitcoin. Rather, Bitcoin has a limit to the number of transactions it can process, which is 1 block per 10 minutes (1 MvB/4 MWU, approximately 2000-4000 transactions). Miners typically choose the transaction paying the highest fee for inclusion in the next block. This means that transactions are included only if they fall within the highest payout of 1MvB among unconfirmed transactions. If you have a lot of high-fee transactions waiting for confirmation, low-fee transactions can potentially wait weeks or months (theoretically forever) for them to be confirmed.

If a service pauses payments due to “congestion”, it simply means that they don’t want to pay high fees to confirm the transaction and prefer to wait for the fees to go down.

Current fees can be found at mempool.space. The minimum fee rate to enter a block has been exceeding 50 sat/vB for several weeks, which is highly unusual.