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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 transport graph

This graph shows the estimated number of clients connecting via bridges. These numbers are derived from directory requests counted on bridges. Bridges distinguish connecting clients by transport protocol, which may include pluggable transports, so that graphs are available for different transports. For further details see these questions and answers about user statistics.

Source:

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
2020-12-05 to 2020-12-09 meek moat An update to an Azure CDN edge server TLS certificate causes an outage of meek and Moat. It is fixed by the release of Tor Browser 10.0.6, which updates the built-in public key pinning of obfs4proxy.
ticket blog post meek graph BridgeDB graph certificate transparency
2020-11-08 to 2020-11-09 snowflake Outage of the snowflake bridge
ticket
2020-10-27 to present Tanzania, United Republic of <OR> obfs4 Blocking of Tor and default obfs4 bridges during elections in Tanzania.
OONI report
2020-10-05 snowflake Deployed version 0.4.2 of the Snowflake WebExtension, with better counting of clients.
comment
2020-08-31 obfs4 Shutdown of default obfs4 bridge frosty.
ticket
2020-08-13 snowflake Deployed version 0.4.1 of the Snowflake WebExtension, with NAT type detection in the browser.
comment
2020-08-09 to 2020-08-12 Belarus Internet shutdowns in Belarus, during protests following a presidential election.
report thread
2020-07-06 snowflake Deployed NAT-aware matching at the Snowflake broker.
comment
2020-06-30 to present Ethiopia Internet shutdown in Ethiopia.
article IODA relay users graph
2020-06-02 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 10.0a1, the first release with Snowflake for Android.
blog post ticket
2020-05-22 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 9.5a13, the first release with Turbo Tunnel session persistence features for Snowflake.
blog post ticket
2020-04-23 snowflake Redeployed the Snowflake bridge with support for non–Turbo Tunnel clients and KCP–Turbo Tunnel clients, removing support for QUIC–Turbo Tunnel clients.
comment
2020-02-22 snowflake Made the Snowflake bridge stop reporting client IP addresses of 0.0.0.0. This also affects log messages that report how many client connections had an attached IP address.
comment
2020-02-19 snowflake Deployed a Turbo Tunnel–capable Snowflake bridge.
comment
2020-02-18 snowflake Outage of the Snowflake bridge caused by memory exhaustion.
ticket
2019-12-06 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "December 3 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 4974C4F1F6842975999D0774F2636F383312EA2D, geoip6-db-digest 2046D67D7BBE67AFF12E1CEDD9F9083AB5E3DFAC).
commit
2019-11-16 to 2019-11-23 Iran Internet blackout in Iran.
report NTC thread
2019-11-14 ipv6 snowflake Changed DNS to point to the IPv6-enabled Snowflake broker.
comment
2019-11-14 snowflake Deployed webext-0.1.0 of the Snowflake proxy (which uses a new proxy–broker protocol) to snowflake.torproject.org.
comment
2019-11-13 snowflake Released version 0.1.0 of the Snowflake extension for Firefox and Chrome, using a new proxy–broker protocol.
comment
2019-11-13 snowflake Restarted the broker with a new proxy–broker protocol.
comment
2019-11-09 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "November 6 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 967E4D14ADF0C9439C31FB7B666537A0551C1E6A, geoip6-db-digest BD6E89A28801FA447693EDEC6D47ECCA03B8CD20).
commit
2019-10-28 snowflake Version 0.0.13 of the Snowflake extension is released, decreasing the poll frequency to once every 300 s. The standalone proxy-go instances still poll once every 5 s.
comment
2019-10-17 snowflake Pointed snowflake-broker.torproject.net (one of three domain names for the Snowflake broker) to a new broker instance set up with IPv6. Metrics unintentionally start being collected from the new instance, instead of the old instance that was still in use.
ticket ticket
2019-10-03 China obfs4 The new default bridge 193.11.166.194 is already blocked by the GFW – two days after the Tor Browser alpha release that shipped with it. The block may have happened sooner, though. We only tested the bridge just now.
ticket
2019-10-02 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "October 1 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 34ABC09019FAB09BA3083B3663EC0B807FC16151, geoip6-db-digest F4D3BEC6294DF7FAEAEE5966CC6706CF91CE9BC4).
commit
2019-10-01 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 9.0a7, the first release that has Snowflake for Windows.
blog post ticket
2019-08-06 to 2019-08-09 Experiment to test the accuracy of relays' advertised bandwidth estimation.
description of experiment post announcing start post announcing end advertised bandwidth graph relay flags graph
2019-07-27 snowflake The Snowflake proxy hosted at snowflake.torproject.org is updated, changing domains from bamsoftware.com to freehaven.net in order to work around the Google Safe Browsing block.
comment
2019-07-27 snowflake Version 0.0.7 of the Snowflake extension for Chrome is released, changing domains from bamsoftware.com to freehaven.net in order to work around the Google Safe Browsing block.
comment
2019-07-26 flashproxy snowflake Cupcake 2.0 is released, now working with Snowflake rather than flash proxy.
Chrome Web Store page
2019-07-26 snowflake Version 0.0.8 of the Snowflake extension for Firefox is released, changing domains from bamsoftware.com to freehaven.net in order to work around the Google Safe Browsing block.
comment
2019-07-23 snowflake The broker domain name snowflake-broker.bamsoftware.com is blocked by Google Safe Browsing, preventing the Snowflake web browser extension from working.
ticket comment noting decrease in proxies
2019-07-18 to 2019-08-07 Kazakhstan The Kazakh ISP KazTelecom does man-in-the-middle of TLS connections.
Censored Planet report post about end
2019-07-03 snowflake The Snowflake web browser extension for Chrome is published.
comment
2019-07-02 to 2019-08-26 Iran <OR> Bridges Relays Relays in Iran are reported to be unblocked once again, and user numbers recover to about 25% of the maximum they had reached during the previous period of unblocking. They then drop precipitously, and bridge users increase.
ticket comment comment
2019-06-26 snowflake The Snowflake web browser extension for Firefox is published.
comment
2019-06-21 to present Burma Internet shutdown in parts of Myanmar.
report 2020 report
2019-06-20 obfs4 A call to set up new obfs4 bridges is posted to the tor-relays mailing list.
mailing list thread thread continues
2019-06-11 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "June 10 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest A131E1F283F4AD307248B03A70B0413E81ADF2A4, geoip6-db-digest 0EFF3EE1E22927EC9A77BFFAFD703F3A5B32FA79).
commit
2019-05-28 Failure of network equipment at site of op-ab OnionPerf instance (equipment now replaced)
onionperf timeouts graph
2019-05-22 fte Release of Tor Browser 9.0a1, removes support for FTE.
blog post ticket
2019-05-17 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "May 13 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 35DFDA2D06D2A0467EF37D60A67B438B11952B74, geoip6-db-digest C0193A1D086819353FABBF70AADB15866B7B2525).
commit
2019-05-16 to 2019-06-23 Iran Relays Tor becomes directly accessible in Iran, leading to an explosion in relay users up to about 1.5 million, before being blocked again.
ticket comment about end tor-talk thread Reddit thread comment Reddit thread
2019-05-01 China snowflake China blocks the default Snowflake proxies.
ticket
2019-04-29 Network equipment failure at site of op-ab OnionPerf instance
performance graph
2019-04-28 to 2019-04-29 Benin Social media blocking and Internet blackout during parliamentary elections in Benin.
OONI report
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
2019-04-23 to present Sri Lanka Sri Lanka blocks Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube after bombings.
relay graph bridge graph article
2019-04-17 Unknown Tor browser update pings roughly double.
graph metrics-team thread
2019-04-16 snowflake Outage of Snowflake fallback proxy-go instances, caused by a failure to restart after segregating old logs.
ticket
2019-04-03 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "April 2 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 62A97D4DEBF76A5CE5C232B95BBF05B191EB8AAA, geoip6-db-digest 66620E57A8427C53D6084B3229807DC320CDC3D0).
commit
2019-03-22 snowflake Outage of the Snowflake broker, caused by a full disk.
ticket
2019-03-07 to 2019-03-30 Venezuela Power outages in Venezuela.
Wikipedia relay users graph IODA
2019-03-06 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "March 4 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 5B90C2F06292D8237A5C77E27ED4ABABF4AE0684, geoip6-db-digest E971FCA4A89F6C685928FF9371D1BF7A2484F4CA).
commit
2019-02-16 to present Belarus Relays Unknown Increase of relay users in Belarus.
graph mailing list post
2019-02-12 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "February 5 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest DDAA25B4425EAA45EE8E92A6531CD3246C8E989A, geoip6-db-digest 0368FA722D90026E60BD60A26F615791A7A53D21).
commit
2019-02-07 snowflake Disabled the 3 proxy-go instances that were pointing at the former broker hosted on App Engine.
comment
2019-01-14 to 2019-01-21 Zimbabwe Internet shutdown and blocking of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter in Zimbabwe.
article OONI report
2019-01-07 Bridges Release of tor 0.3.5.7, 0.3.4.10, and 0.3.3.11. Fixes the bug, present since 0.3.5.1-alpha/0.3.4.1-alpha, of idle bridges being unuseful.
comment ticket blog post ticket
2019-01-07 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "January 3 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 2B8A70B399CF8B471289A4DB52947DE965D8DE5F, geoip6-db-digest FEA33E6F398DF67252F41DDD3D010E69B33D544E).
commit
2019-01-07 to 2019-01-08 Gabon Internet shutdown in Gabon following a coup attempt.
OONI report NetBlocks report
2018-07-20 to 2019-05-02 onion Unknown The number of v2 onion services increases from 70k to 100k.
comment
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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