Users
We estimate the number of users by analyzing the requests induced by clients to relays and bridges.
This graph shows the estimated number of clients connecting via bridges. These numbers are derived from directory requests counted on bridges. Bridges resolve client IP addresses of incoming directory requests to country codes, and they distinguish connecting clients by transport protocol, which may include pluggable transports. Even though bridges don't report a combination of clients by country and transport, it's possible to derive and graph lower and upper bounds from existing usage statistics. For further details check the documentation on Reproducible Metrics.
Related events
The following events have been manually collected in the metrics-timeline Git repository and might be related to the displayed graph.
| Dates | Places/Protocols | Description and Links |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-03-09 | snowflake |
Update snowflake-01 bridge to tor 0.4.9.5
|
| 2026-03-05 | snowflake |
Update snowflake-02 bridge to tor 0.4.9.5 for a metrics issue.
issue issue |
| 2024-05-14 to present |
High load leading to network performance issues.
status.torproject.org forum post |
|
| 2023-01-20 to present | webstats Unknown |
Tor Browser update pings drop temporarily. A similar effect is present in other years.
graph issue |
| 2022-02-24 to present | Russia Ukraine |
Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the following days, various social media are partially blocked in Russia. Bridge users increase in Russia; relay and bridge users increase in Ukraine.
Wikipedia Relay users in Russia Bridge users in Russia Relay users in Ukraine Bridge users in Ukraine OONI article |
| 2021-12-01 to present | Russia |
Blocking of Tor directory authorities, relays, default obfs4 bridges, meek-azure, and Snowflake in some ISPs in Russia. There was a temporary cease of blocking for less than a day starting on 2021-12-08.
NTC thread BBS thread issue blog post OONI report |
| 2021-06-10 to present |
Experiment to test latencies between relays.
status.torproject.org post announcing start |
|
| 2019-04-27 to present | Russia Relays Unknown |
Relay users increase by about 100K, in an apparent weekly cycle. Bridge users are not similarly affected.
relay graph bridge graph tor-talk thread Reddit thread |
| 2018-09-26 to present | fte |
Outage of default FTE bridge 128.105.214.162:8080.
comment |
| 2018-09-26 to present | fte |
Outage of default FTE bridge 128.105.214.163:8080.
comment |
| 2018-01-05 to present |
Outage of the op-hk OnionPerf instance.
op-hk graph |
|
| 2017-12-04 to present |
DDoS attack creates load on the network.
tor-relays thread relay graph summary post ticket |
|
| 2017-02-10 to present | OR exit |
Measurement error from bandwidth authority causes decrease in measured bandwidth in Europe.
mailing list post |