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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.

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
2018-08-09 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "August 7 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 4C2E4FF8220FFFB4989564728701016DF705BCBF, geoip6-db-digest F3F5C576BF3E8D5FD9F6F33603D7BFD64DEAA8B5).
commit
2018-08-04 to 2018-08-05 Collector was missing consensuses. They were recovered via recent relay consensus diffs.
metrics-team thread tor-relays thread
2018-07-21 Bridges The estimated number of bridge users becomes available again, following the introduction of the new bridge authority Serge on 2018-07-13. The stats took about a week to reappear because of the discontinuity in bridge reporting affecting the estimated fraction of reporting bridges.
mailing list post graph
2018-07-20 to 2019-05-02 onion Unknown The number of v2 onion services increases from 70k to 100k.
comment
2018-07-15 snowflake Made the Snowflake bridge report to the new Serge bridge authority.
comment
2018-07-14 Bridges Release of Tor 0.2.9.16, 0.3.2.11, 0.3.3.9, and 0.3.4.5-rc. Switches bridge authority from Bifroest to Serge. The number of bridges begins counting up from zero as bridges are upgraded. The estimated number of bridge users remained unavailable until 2018-07-21 because of the discontinuity.
announcement ticket blog post number of bridges graph
2018-07-14 to 2018-07-25 Iraq Protests, Internet shutdowns, and social media blocks in Iraq.
relay graph NetBlocks post NRT article about end Psiphon users
2018-07-13 Bridges The replacement bridge authority Serge begins publishing bridge descriptors.
ticket ticket number of bridges graph
2018-07-06 Bridges The bridge authority Bifroest stops publishing bridge descriptors. Bridge stats are unavailable until 2018-07-13 and the introduction of a new bridge authority.
ticket ticket mailing list post number of bridges graph
2018-07-06 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "July 3 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest CFFD7B0544879150A31F966E83DBB7DDDFA16F49, geoip6-db-digest B25710F60CB23F0C76F58AFB0A26A26ACB701BB2).
commit
2018-07-04 to 2018-07-06 snowflake Outage of the Snowflake bridge, caused by a full disk.
ticket
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
2018-06-11 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 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
2018-04-25 to 2018-07-02 onion Unknown The number of v2 onion services increases from 70k to 120k.
ticket

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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.