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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”
Relay users graph

This graph shows the estimated number of directly-connecting clients; that is, it excludes clients connecting via bridges. These estimates are derived from the number of directory requests counted on directory authorities and mirrors. Relays resolve client IP addresses to country codes, so that graphs are available for most countries. Furthermore, it is possible to display indications of censorship events as obtained from an anomaly-based censorship-detection system (for more details, see this technical report). For further details check the documentation on Reproducible Metrics.

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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
2015-01-22 ipv4 geoip database updated to "January 7 2015 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 49D309B9663C4EFB8D126D84BBB373D7C84658C3).
commit
2015-01-22 ipv6 geoip6 database updated to "January 7 2015 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip6-db-digest 9B26276EA470137894566882885AD82701D38D62).
commit
2014-11-24 ipv4 geoip database updated to "November 15 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest DC1A94D962AE165EF4AA1F14857A23C34875F39D).
commit
2014-11-24 ipv6 geoip6 database updated to "November 15 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip6-db-digest 923BA7ED922B2A4B30C9B76EE7E72D1D1714BFAF).
commit
2014-11-17 obfs4 Release of Tor Browser 4.5-alpha-1, first alpha release with obfs4. (Tor Browser changelog says 2014-11-14.)
blog post
2014-11-15 meek Moved the meek-google bridge to better hardware.
2014-11-08 meek Changed the meek-google App Engine instance back to the F1 class, from F2.
2014-10-31 meek Changed the meek-google App Engine instance to the F2 class again, from F1.
2014-10-27 meek Changed the meek-google App Engine instance back to the F1 class, from F2.
2014-10-25 meek Changed the bridge backing meek-google.
2014-10-25 meek Changed the meek-google App Engine instance to the F2 class, from F1.
2014-10-15 meek scramblesuit Tor Browser 4.0 released. This is the first stable release with meek and ScrambleSuit built in.
blog post
2014-10-14 meek Enabled PublishServerDescriptor on the meek-amazon bridge. Between 2014-09-29 and 2014-10-14, meek-amazon users were not being counted.
mailing list post
2014-09-29 meek Changed the bridge backing meek-amazon.
2014-09-29 China China blocks Instagram in response to ongoing protests in Hong Kong. A research paper by Hobbs and Roberts shows evidence for an increase in circumvention, but the measurable effect on Tor is slight if anything.
relay graph bridge graph BBC article research paper
2014-09-16 meek Switched meek-amazon to HTTPS.
ticket
2014-09-15 flashproxy meek Split the bridge running meek and flashproxy into separate processes in order to avoid spurious correlation in user counts.
mailing list post
2014-08-29 to 2014-09-01 fte Decrease in fte users, perhaps caused by an outage of one of the default Tor Browser bridges.
mailing list post
2014-08-15 meek 'How to use the “meek” pluggable transport' blog post is published.
blog post
2014-08-13 ipv4 geoip database updated to "August 7 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 9EF0A1874377BFB6413ED3F9EB5504B1DB17BE13).
commit
2014-08-13 ipv6 geoip6 database updated to "August 7 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip6-db-digest 542D349827A88738A04332DAFF2516A384BCC8FF).
commit
2014-08-12 Tor Browser 3.6.4 released.
blog post
2014-08-12 meek scramblesuit Tor Browser 4.0-alpha-1 released. This is the first release to have meek and ScrambleSuit built in.
blog post
2014-07-28 meek Set up meek-amazon CDN configuration.
2014-07-18 ipv4 geoip database updated to "July 10 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest F2E34A314F2101E3F5AE0774660C4BA670646B8D).
commit
2014-07-18 ipv6 geoip6 database updated to "July 10 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip6-db-digest 45893A1BDDABACCEB346DE4644A155450FD28B0E).
commit
2014-06-10 ipv4 geoip database updated to "June 4 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest BFC7453BBEAD611B7FF97AD71BE3392AA8BCFBE3).
commit
2014-06-10 ipv6 geoip6 database updated to "June 4 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip6-db-digest E0A79ABC85672AACD47878029C2C383D4C669335).
commit
2014-05-08 flashproxy meek Reinstalled the bridge running meek and flash proxy.
2014-04-29 flashproxy fte obfs2 obfs3 Release of Tor Browser 3.6, the first stable release with integrated pluggable transports.
blog post transport graph
2014-04-11 Release of Tor Browser 3.6-beta-2.
blog post
2014-03-18 flashproxy fte obfs2 obfs3 Release of Tor Browser 3.6-beta-1, the first release with integrated pluggable transports.
blog post
2014-02-25 ipv4 geoip database updated to "February 7 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 182195DB4DA9A979A829012F71CF128FAF1203F7).
commit
2014-02-15 flashproxy meek Began running meek-server on bridge already hosting websocket-server for flash proxy.
2014-02-13 ipv6 geoip6 database updated to "February 7 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip6-db-digest FB95DF46D6B29167668F4D2CAC9F947C4B2A0C26).
commit
2014-02-08 ipv4 geoip database updated to "February 7 2014 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest FA903A1122A248E107A1C17A5AC50A5852F03966).
commit
2014-01-31 meek First public announcement of meek.
mailing list post
2013-08-19 to 2014-04-28 <OR> Relays Relay users increase globally from about 800K to over 5M, when computers in the Mevade/Sefnit botnet began using Tor to communicate. The user count decreased in the following months through efforts to clean up the botnet. Sometime in 2014-04, the botnet switched from using Tor to using SSH.
blog post tech report analysis switch to SSH

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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.