Time out on opponents side but I lost the game?

Last evening i was playing a 10 minutes rated game aaginst BlckArrow;after certain number of moves ;the opponent stopped playing moves till she/he reached 0.00..after a while when i refershed the board ,it showed to my shock and amazement that Black won the game ..i still am trying to figure out this..I am very sure i waiting till the time ran out for her/him.I am not worried about losing a game or more but am worried about the accuracy of the time outs.
I never faced this issue in the past thats why writing .

I have had this occur a couple of times. It had to do with me disconnecting, but not getting an indication as per usual. It looked like my opponent ran out of time, but when I refreshed, it turned out I had disconnected and then not rejoined in time. I use the word disconnected loosely since it has only been Lichess that I disconnect from, not any other site (chess or otherwise). Sometimes now I will just periodically refresh in longer time controls if it seems like my opponent is taking an unreasonable time to move, just to make sure I am still connected to the particular game. From a bit of research, it isn't an incredibly common problem and we might need to capture more events as they happen to give the team something concrete to look for. I will try to do so, but they are fairly unpredictable.

Yes, this is because you probably got disconnected momentarily or if there was a temporary server outage. On Tuesday morning the LiChess server went down for 20 minutes. This network outage, caused me to lose on timeout! Because this bad fortunate happened due to the outage occurring while it was my turn. My opponent artificially received a win.

I kept getting Reconnecting Network error. The internet didn't drop out, all my other websites were working fine as usual and router stats is showing Up Time has not reset itself.

Fortunately for me my game loss was recorded only as a timeout but no disconnection recorded. If you ever experience Reconnecting Network error. Immediately open another website in a new tab just to see if the internet is working. If it is, then it is the LiChess server to be blamed!

The game will automatically reconnect you. Do NOT refresh the web browser because the LiChess system interprets this as a rage quit. And if within 10 seconds you do not return your game due to a browser refresh, then your opponent will click to claim victory and then you will get disconnection loss instead. My suggestion is to just keep your browser opened and wait, you have 2 minutes to reconnect. The game will auto-reconnect without needing to refresh the browser.

I also strongly recommend you have a mobile phone handy so you can immediately login to lichess through your phones sim network just for the benefit of the doubt, in case your internet does not return back within the 2 minute time frame. I always have a phone handy for emergency use that is why I have 0 disconnections in over 8000 games on LiChess.

@GoLdEnFLAME I've found that refreshing works fine most of the time if it is just a simple client-Lichess disconnect. I know there is a time limit where the opponent can claim victory, but I don't think it is within the time of a refresh. As for the server going down entirely they will often mark all games as aborted (no record or rating change). I know this slips through the cracks sometimes and I'm sorry that you were one of the ones who had to deal with it.

@PushThatPawn Well yeah, unfortunately it is actually the server going down. The site appeared viewable but the players all appeared offline (grey dot) with a network error in red. I know there have been complaints from people about ports TCP 80, TCP/UDP 443 and 9000 that if blocked this may also cause this intermittent issue. But I have made sure all ports are forwarded and used port forwarding checker tool to make sure the ports are always open under my Static IP address.

Given that LiChess is a free server it appears that it does not have a back-up network running at the same time, so if it goes down, it goes down. There are Multiplayer Game servers that have more than 1 server running so if one goes down the other will rescue it in an emergency to prevent from the outage happening. That doesn't quite seem to be the case with LiChess having seen it go down for more than 20 minutes on Tuesday morning GMT. Although this is an extremely rare occurrence. This is probably my second or third experience in over 8000+ games.

I even emailed LiChess Support, but sadly as always they seem to be ignoring emails 90% of the times. LiChess is still probably the best free online chess server, but when it comes to their email support it's almost non-existent.

With regards to refreshing the browser. There is a small % of risk that in case during the refresh of the browser the internet did drop-out then you will get a disconnect loss in 10 seconds. As the system will have interpreted it as a rage quit. This is why I don't have the guts to refresh. I know the probability of having a drop out is extremely small to happen just while refreshing. But I won't take even the slightest of risks. Because you know people are going to quickly click "Claim Victory" after 10 seconds even if they were losing the game.

@GoLdEnFLAME I've definitely seen the adorable robot server down image in the middle of a game, but those were usually aborted when I got back. In one instance I found my opponent was delayed coming back and was about to run out of time, so I manually adjusted his clock to about where it was when we had been interrupted. I lost that game but winning on time when it isn't the opponent's fault would feel cheap.

It's a fair point that you make about getting what you pay for with a free server. Lichess is indeed the best free chess site, I've ever come across. Their operating costs are just over $100,000 a year. Expense Breakdown: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CGgu-7aNxlZkjLl9l-OlL00fch06xp0Q7eCVDDakYEE/preview

I've never tried e-mailing support, but maybe they would respond to a ping on Discord. I've found that most of the staff are pretty friendly.