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Users

We estimate the number of users by analyzing the requests induced by clients to relays and bridges.

  • Relay users
  • Bridge users by country
  • Bridge users by transport
  • Bridge users by country and transport
  • Bridge users by IP version
  • BridgeDB requests by requested transport
  • BridgeDB requests by distributor
  • Top-10 countries by relay users
  • Top-10 countries by possible censorship events
  • Top-10 countries by bridge users
  • “The anonymous Internet”
Bridge users by country graph

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, so that graphs are available for most countries. For further details check the documentation on Reproducible Metrics.

Download graph as PNG or PDF.

Download data as CSV.

Learn more about the CSV data format or how to reproduce the graph data.

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
2018-07-01 to present Uganda A social media tax takes effect in Uganda. The government pressures ISPs to block VPNs.
relay graph bridge graph BBC article AllAfrica article OONI report
2018-06-27 meek Release of Tor Browser 8.0a9 with non-working meek.
blog post ticket
2018-06-24 to 2018-07-06 snowflake Metrics for Snowflake are missing, for unknown reasons. The gap is nearly contemporaneous with the gap the measurements for all transports/bridges caused by Bifroest–Serge bridge authority switchover, but starts about 2 weeks earlier in Snowflake's case.
ticket
2018-06-20 to present Venezuela Venezuela's largest ISP, CANTV, blocks direct access to Tor and the IP addresses of default bridges. meek and non-default bridges are reported to work.
ticket mailing list post Access Now report
2018-06-11 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "June 7 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 93112125248AD2C11A2531B934FD4AC03999738D, geoip6-db-digest BFD2B453F2D9DC875B7B0C464A185E6C3202534F).
commit
2018-06-10 to 2018-07-11 Turkey Relays Unknown Jump of relay users in Turkey, from 5k to about 30k. The timing of the beginning corresponds to the release of Tor Browser 7.5.5 and 8.0a8.
relay graph bridge graph comment
2018-06-10 meek Release of Tor Browser 8.0a8, removes meek-amazon option.
blog post
2018-06-09 meek Release of Tor Browser 7.5.5, removes meek-amazon option.
blog post
2018-05-23 to 2018-07-01 Bridges Unknown Sharp increase in bridge users in many unrelated countries, affecting even the global aggregate. Relay users unaffected. The graphs reach a peak around 2018-06-07 and then begin falling again. An incomplete sampling of affected countries: Bangladesh Chile Indonesia Morocco Venezuela.
relay graph bridge graph
2018-05-22 to 2018-06-08 Iraq obfs4 Unknown Increase in obfs4 users in Iraq, followed by a slow decrease. No matching change in relay users or other transports.
bridge graph
2018-05-17 Bridges Release of tor 0.3.4.1-alpha. Has a bug that makes idle bridges unuseful.
ticket ticket
2018-05-15 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "May 1 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 765D2F123DDA7DAEA9C9263975E2B4BAFBD2B908, geoip6-db-digest 2AA568CC898BF9924FBACEA26946AA7ED10E7D87).
commit
2018-05-14 meek Disabled the d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net CDN endpoint for meek-amazon.
Tor Browser ticket Orbot ticket
2018-05-09 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 8.0a7, which changes the default Snowflake rendezvous to use an Azure domain front, instead of the Google one that had been non-functional since 2018-04-13.
blog post ticket
2018-05-08 meek The meek-amazon bridge imposes a rate limit of 1 MB/s.
2018-05-08 Russia Russia unblocks about 3.7 million IP addresses belonging to Google and Digital Ocean.
Roskomnadzor press release monitoring page
2018-04-30 to present Iran Iranian ISPs block Telegram.
ticket article relay graph bridge graph Psiphon users
2018-04-28 Russia Russia unblocks about 3 million IP addresses belonging to Amazon and OVH.
Roskomnadzor press release monitoring page
2018-04-25 to 2018-07-02 onion Unknown The number of v2 onion services increases from 70k to 120k.
ticket
2018-04-16 to 2018-05-08 Russia Russia tries to block Telegram; blocks about 18 million IP addresses including some belonging to Amazon and Google cloud services.
article relay graph bridge graph
2018-04-16 snowflake Moved the Snowflake broker from App Engine to a standalone server.
comment
2018-04-13 snowflake Snowflake client registrations (based on domain fronting) stop working, because of a Google infrastructure change that stops domain fronting from working. The time of the change is between 2018-04-13 14:00:00 and 2018-04-13 18:00:00, based on when the bandwidth graph of the Snowflake bridge 5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6915AB06BFB7F went to zero.
ticket
2018-04-05 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "April 3 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 8A53650327E8D30E971DC90F564BA9BD1A513F19, geoip6-db-digest 698852511F6BC27DFFC115805044C71FDCCF70AF).
commit
2018-04-02 to 2018-04-18 snowflake Accidentally misconfigured the 3 proxy-go instances that were meant to point to the new standalone broker so that they pointed to the old App Engine broker.
start end
2018-04-02 snowflake Reinstated periodic restarts of the fallback snowflake proxies.
comment
2018-03-28 to present Chad Chad blocks social messaging apps.
article graph
2018-03-27 snowflake Restarted the fallback snowflake proxies with no limit on memory.
comment
2018-03-26 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 8.0a5. Improves snowflake client performance.
blog post ticket
2018-03-23 snowflake Restarted the fallback snowflake proxies with a limit on resident memory (ulimit -m) rather than virtual memory (ulimit -v).
comment comment
2018-03-22 snowflake Provisionally increased memory limits of the fallback snowflake proxies to 400 MB, 800 MB, or unlimited.
comment
2018-03-22 snowflake Increased memory limit of the fallback snowflake proxies from 200 MB to 400 MB.
comment comment
2018-03-22 snowflake Disabled periodic restarts of the fallback snowflake proxies; gave them a memory limit of 200 MB.
comment
2018-03-16 snowflake Deployed another attempt to fix frequent crashes of the fallback snowflake proxies.
comment
2018-03-14 snowflake Deployed an attempt to fix frequent crashes of the fallback snowflake proxies.
comment commit
2018-03-12 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "March 8 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 0FD75C42A32E82100361BD367CB13862806E6A13, geoip6-db-digest 5AFA101C4A6AD4289CEE4575943D6BA851606245).
commit
2018-03-07 to 2018-03-15 Sri Lanka Sri Lanka blocks Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Viber.
relay graph bridge graph article
2018-03-05 to 2018-03-08 Germany <OR> Relays Unknown Steady drop in the number of relay users in Germany, from 1.5M to 650k. (Drop coincides with the release of tor 0.3.2.10, 0.3.1.10, and 0.2.9.15, which offer better resistance against DoS attacks; as well as improvements in speed for downloads from onions graph; see this graph as well. More datapoints: DDoS of the network happened around the time that saw an increase in the number of relay users in Germany, see entry above or graph)
graph ticket
2018-03-03 Release of tor 0.3.2.10, 0.3.1.10, and 0.2.9.15, which offer better resistance against DoS attacks.
blog post ticket
2018-02-27 to 2018-03-02 Less than 3 bandwidth authorities are available.
tor-relays
2017-10-01 to 2018-03-01 Cameroon Internet shutdown in parts of Cameroon.
article article
2017-03-01 to 2018-11-12 United Arab Emirates <OR> Relays Unknown Another increase in relay users, slower and more sustained than the previous one.
graph ticket about end
2015-12-31 to 2020-06-04 Mexico The Telmex ISP in Mexico blocks seven directory authorities.
mailing list post article

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This material is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0959138. Any opinions, finding, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. "Tor" and the "Onion Logo" are registered trademarks of The Tor Project, Inc.. Data on this site is freely available under a CC0 no copyright declaration: To the extent possible under law, the Tor Project has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights in the data. Graphs are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.