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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.

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
2022-02-28 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 thread about social media blocks
2022-02-18 snowflake Outage of the Snowflake bridge.
mailing list post
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
2022-01-28 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 a temporary load-balanced staging server. Debugged connection problems until 2022-01-25 18:47:00.
issue comment post comment
2022-01-10 Kazakhstan obfs4 The Tor Project begins to distribute obfs4 bridges that listen on ports that are reachable in Kazakhstan, despite the ongoing Internet shutdown.
forum post
2022-01-07 snowflake Increased capacity of the mapping to client IP addresses on the snowflake bridge.
issue deployment comment
2022-01-05 to 2022-01-11 Kazakhstan Country-wide Internet shutdown in Kazakhstan. Was preceded by a shutdown of most mobile networks starting 2022-01-04 14:30. Access was restored for a few hours each day.
Cloudflare blog post RIPE Labs blog post NTC thread BBS thread IODA
2022-01-04 Gambia Internet outage in Gambia.
blog post
2021-12-29 snowflake Outage of the snowflake bridge.
comment alert
2021-12-24 Russia obfs4 Another round of obfs4 enumeration and blocking occurs in Russia.
comment
2021-12-22 to present Finland Relays Unknown Increase of relay users in Finland.
tor-talk thread possible explanation graph
2021-12-22 snowflake Rebooted the Snowflake bridge to increase the number of CPUs from 4 to 8.
issue
2021-12-14 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 11.5a1, with an altered DTLS fingerprint in Snowflake to counteract blocking in Russia.
blog post issue NTC post
2021-12-13 Russia The fraction of networks in Russia blocking Tor, measured by OONI, increases from about 20% to about 50%.
relay graph
2021-12-08 obfs4 Release of Tor Browser 11.0.2, containing a new default obfs4 bridge "deusexmachina".
blog post issue
2021-12-08 Russia The Tor Project web server block is expanded from *.www.torproject.org to *.torproject.org.
record GitLab comment NTC comment zapret-info diff
2021-12-07 Russia The www.torproject.org web server is added to the registry of blocked domain names in Russia, by IP addresses and by hostname *.www.torproject.org.
record GitLab comment NTC comment zapret-info diff OONI report
2021-12-01 to 2021-12-13 Russia meek Blocking of the IP address of the meek-azure front domain in certains ISPs in Russia, part of a wider phenomenon of blocking Tor beginning 2021-12-01.
post about start (2021-12-03) post about end (2021-12-13) post about end (2021-12-15) post about end (2021-12-26)
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
2021-11-17 to 2022-02-02 obfs4 Run a Tor Bridge campaign, offers rewards for running obfs4 bridges.
blog post about start blog post about end
2021-11-08 Removal of roughly 600 "KAX17" non-exit relays.
mailing list post relay graph article
2021-11-08 onion Release of Tor Browser 11.0. Final deprecation of v2 onion services.
blog post deprecation timeline graph
2021-10-29 Turkmenistan Relays Unknown Further decrease of relay users in Turkmenistan.
comment discussion
2021-10-24 Turkmenistan snowflake Unknown Snowflake users in Turkmenistan drop to zero, possibly as a result of blocking of the broker's domain-fronting channel.
issue comment discussion
2021-10-08 to 2021-11-14 Netherlands Relays Unknown Temporary quintupling of direct users from the Netherlands.
relay graph
2021-10-03 to present Egypt Relays Unknown Increase of relay users in Egypt.
Twitter thread relay graph
2021-10-01 to 2021-10-07 Belarus Relays Increase of users in Belarus, relay only. According to OONI data, the Tor Project website was unblocked and Tor direct connections were accessible for a few days and, then, it was blocked again.
graph OONI Tor test
2021-09-22 to 2021-10-07 Experiment to investigate the accuracy of relays' advertised bandwidth.
status.torproject.org mailing list post advertised bandwidth graph
2021-08-31 to 2021-09-12 Brazil Relays Increase of users in Brazil, relay only, due protests.
graph article
2021-08-27 to 2021-09-08 Experiment to investigate the accuracy of relays' advertised bandwidth.
status.torproject.org mailing list post advertised bandwidth graph
2021-08-12 to 2021-08-14 Zambia Block of social media websites and WhatsApp during the national elections. Increase in the number of users.
article ticket OONI report relay graph bridge graph
2021-08-12 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "IPFire Project Thu, 12 Aug 2021 05:51:15 GMT" (geoip-db-digest B3A9770171D3060502B7F13C0618BE109B92DF6C, geoip6-db-digest 410B70763FC675B3622264FAA0FC67B78FDE30C2).
commit
2021-08-08 Ukraine Relays Unknown Large increase of relay users in Ukraine. Bridge users unaffected.
comment anti-censorship team discussion relay graph bridge graph
2021-07-22 to 2021-07-31 Turkmenistan Relays Unknown Decrease in relay users by 75% in Turkmenistan, following a period of elevated usage that began in early 2021.
ticket anti-censorship team discussion NTC thread
2021-07-06 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 10.5, first stable release that includes Snowflake.
blog post
2021-06-20 to 2021-06-24 Algeria Social media blocking during national high school exams.
SMEX
2021-06-15 snowflake Snowflake bridge down for scheduled upgrade.
comment
2021-06-12 to 2021-06-13 snowflake Outage of Snowflake bridge.
issue
2021-06-10 to present Experiment to test latencies between relays.
status.torproject.org post announcing start
2021-06-10 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "IPFire Project Thu, 10 Jun 2021 05:17:29 GMT" (geoip-db-digest 900E9BD6C8B8679A1539F7F316974E86618038B2, geoip6-db-digest 456BCA0796A27F8C80674EE89B1323F8310BED39).
commit
2021-06-04 to present Nigeria Block of Twitter in Nigeria. Increase in the number of bridge users.
article relay graph bridge graph
2021-05-17 to 2021-06-05 Experiment to test the accuracy of relays' advertised bandwidth estimation.
status.torproject.org post announcing start post announcing end advertised bandwidth graph relay flags graph
2021-05-12 to 2021-06-21 snowflake Error in stats collection at the Snowflake bridge; user count is erroneously zero.
merge request comment on start comment on end user count graph

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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.