when tor network is under load contact adding does not work

[themusicgod1]

Attempted to add another contact. Contact reported that they did not receive an invite popup window.
Both of us observed in our tor logs that there was 'network overload':

Dec 15 15:33:42.000 [notice] Your Guard $GUARD ($GUARDIDSTRING) is failing more circuits than usual. Most likely this means the Tor network is overloaded. Success counts are 160/229. Use counts are 79/79. 208 circuits

(for $GUARD and $GUARDSTRING being the particular guard/guard id.)

ricochet-im: 1.1.4-1
ubuntu: 17.10 artful
tor: 0.3.0.10

when said other person went to add me, they immediately appeared as online on my contact list - no request popped up.

what did happen:

when tor network is congested, contact adding silently fails. This is made worse by issue #1702141 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ricochet-im/+bug/1702141 )

what should have happened:

in case of network congestion, attempts to add a contact should reccur periodically, perhaps with an exponential backoff.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: ricochet (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-17.20-generic 4.13.8
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-17-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu3.6
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Dec 15 15:44:56 2017
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-04-18 (241 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" - Release amd64 (20170412)
JournalErrors:
 Error: command ['journalctl', '-b', '--priority=warning', '--lines=1000'] failed with exit code 1: Hint: You are currently not seeing messages from other users and the system.
       Users in the 'systemd-journal' group can see all messages. Pass -q to
       turn off this notice.
 No journal files were opened due to insufficient permissions.
SourcePackage: ricochet
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to artful on 2017-10-19 (57 days ago)