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Tor Metrics
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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 check the documentation on Reproducible Metrics.

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
2022-04-12 snowflake Stopped the tor instances flakey1–flakey8 on the interim Snowflake bridge, leaving only instances flakey1–flakey4 running on the new bridge.
comment
2022-04-11 snowflake Moved Snowflake traffic to a new bridge running instances flakey1–flakey4.
comment
2022-04-11 to 2022-04-12 Turkmenistan The intensity of Internet blocking in Turkmenistan increases. Some sources inside the country claim that "the Internet has been blocked almost completely".
NTC thread Access Now post Cloudflare Radar tweet
2022-04-11 snowflake Started a new Snowflake bridge running tor instances flakey1–flakey4, temporarily running in parallel with the interim bridge with its instances flakey1–flakey8.
comment
2022-03-19 snowflake Stopped the tor instances flakey1–flakey4 on the old Snowflake bridge, leaving only instances flakey1–flakey8 running on the interim bridge.
comment
2022-03-18 snowflake Restarted the interim Snowflake bridge to correct a problem with onion keys.
comment
2022-03-16 snowflake Moved Snowflake traffic to the interim bridge running instances flakey1–flakey8.
comment
2022-03-15 snowflake Started an interim Snowflake bridge running tor instances nicknamed flakey1–flakey8, temporarily running in parallel with the main bridge with its instances flakey1–flakey4.
comment
2022-02-28 Bridges BridgeDB moves to an rdsys backend.
announcement 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
2022-02-18 snowflake Outage of the Snowflake bridge.
mailing list post alert failed alert succeeded
2022-02-04 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "IPFire Project Fri, 04 Feb 2022 05:51:31 GMT" (geoip-db-digest C4F1B5ECF1B07BBECBE06B93926E4D1E62882782, geoip6-db-digest 0E43B5C62033BFE47F32742D8C9F5B5F83180AA4).
commit
2022-02-01 Tor 0.3.5 reaches end of life.
mailing list post
2022-01-31 snowflake Switched the snowflake bridge from a load-balanced staging server back to the now load-balanced production server. Debugged connection problems until 2022-01-31 19:52:04.
issue comment comment
2022-01-30 snowflake Rebuilt the production bridge, which had run a single flakey instance, to run four instances flakey1–flakey4.
comment
2022-01-28 snowflake Switched the snowflake-server (at the time running on a load-balanced staging server) for a version with CPU profiling.
comment
2022-01-25 snowflake Switched the snowflake bridge to the temporary load-balanced staging server. Debugged connection problems until 2022-01-25 18:47:00.
issue comment post comment
2022-01-24 snowflake Started a temporary load-balanced Snowflake staging server running four instances flakey1–flakey4. Ran in parallel with the existing production instances (single flakey until 2022-01-30 04:51:00, flakey1–flakey4 thereafter) and the flakey1–flakey4 instances of the practice staging bridge until 2022-02-03 05:39:24.
comment
2022-01-24 to 2022-02-10 Uzbekistan Relays Unknown Temporary decrease in relay users in Uzbekistan.
relay users graph
2022-01-17 to 2022-02-03 snowflake Ran a practice Snowflake staging bridge with four instances flakey1–flakey4, initially in parallel with the production bridge running a single flakey instance.
comment mailing list post
2022-01-12 to 2022-08-08 webstats Unknown Tor Browser update pings drop temporarily. A similar effect is present in other years.
graph issue issue
2022-01-11 to 2022-02-01 Burkina Faso obfs4 Unknown Temporary spike in obfs4 users from Burkina Faso.
bridge users graph
2021-12-22 to present Finland Relays Unknown Increase of relay users in Finland.
tor-talk thread possible explanation graph
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
2021-11-22 to 2022-11-28 Burkina Faso Shutdown of mobile Internet in Burkina Faso.
article relay users graph tweet
2021-11-17 to 2022-02-02 obfs4 Run a Tor Bridge campaign, offers rewards for running obfs4 bridges.
blog post about start blog post about end
2021-10-03 to present Egypt Relays Unknown Increase of relay users in Egypt.
Twitter thread relay graph
2021-06-10 to present Experiment to test latencies between relays.
status.torproject.org post announcing start
2021-06-04 to present Nigeria Block of Twitter in Nigeria. Increase in the number of bridge users.
article relay graph bridge graph
2021-04-01 to present Myanmar Shutdowns of wireless broadband in Myanmar.
Access Now post
2021-01-01 to present China snowflake Unknown Increased failure to bootstrap using Snowflake from China.
comment
2020-10-27 to present Tanzania, United Republic of OR obfs4 Blocking of Tor and default obfs4 bridges during elections in Tanzania.
OONI report
2019-06-21 to present Myanmar Internet shutdown in parts of Myanmar.
report 2020 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
2019-02-16 to present Belarus Relays Unknown Increase of relay users in Belarus.
graph mailing list post
2018-12-20 to present Sudan Protests and social media blocks in Sudan.
relay graph Access Now post Psiphon users
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
2018-07-28 to present Turkey Relays Unknown Another jump of relay users in Turkey, from 5k to about 30k.
relay graph bridge graph
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
2018-06-20 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
2018-04-30 to present Iran Iranian ISPs block Telegram.
ticket article relay graph bridge graph Psiphon users
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
2017-08-07 to present Congo, The Democratic Republic of the The Democratic Republic of the Congo orders a block of social media services.
article relay graph bridge graph
2017-02-10 to present OR exit Measurement error from bandwidth authority causes decrease in measured bandwidth in Europe.
mailing list post
2016-12-15 to present Congo, The Democratic Republic of the The Democratic Republic of the Congo orders a block of social media services.
article relay graph bridge graph
2016-11-03 to present Turkey Turkey blocks Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp.
article
2016-10-25 to present Egypt OR Relays Egypt blocks Tor directory authorities and public relays by TCP RST. Bridges work.
OONI report

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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.