Users
We estimate the number of users by analyzing the requests induced by clients to relays and bridges.
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.
Related events
The following events have been manually collected in the metrics-timeline Git repository and might be related to the displayed graph.
The manually collected events in this table do not necessarily match the automatically generated possible censorship events shown in the graph.
| Dates | Places/Protocols | Description and Links |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-03-09 | snowflake |
Update snowflake-01 bridge to tor 0.4.9.5
|
| 2026-03-05 | snowflake |
Update snowflake-02 bridge to tor 0.4.9.5 for a metrics issue.
issue issue |
| 2026-02-10 | snowflake |
Update snowflake-01 bridge to tor 0.4.8.22 for a metrics issue.
issue |
| 2026-01-28 |
Release of tor 0.4.8.22. Includes a change to count consensus downloads only after they have completed. Before this, incomplete consensus downloads (such as could be caused by the blocking of Tor) would inflate apparent user count statistics.
announcement release notes issue |
|
| 2024-05-14 to present |
High load leading to network performance issues.
status.torproject.org forum post |
|
| 2023-01-20 to present | webstats Unknown |
Tor Browser update pings drop temporarily. A similar effect is present in other years.
graph issue |
| 2021-06-10 to present |
Experiment to test latencies between relays.
status.torproject.org post announcing start |
|
| 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 |
| 2018-01-05 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 |
|
| 2017-02-10 to present | OR exit |
Measurement error from bandwidth authority causes decrease in measured bandwidth in Europe.
mailing list post |
| 2016-11-03 to present | Turkey |
Turkey blocks Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp.
article |