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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
2018-05-08 meek The meek-amazon bridge imposes a rate limit of 1 MB/s.
2018-04-25 to 2018-07-02 onion Unknown The number of v2 onion services increases from 70k to 120k.
ticket
2018-04-16 snowflake Moved the Snowflake broker from App Engine to a standalone server.
comment
2018-04-13 snowflake Snowflake client registrations (based on domain fronting) stop working, because of a Google infrastructure change that stops domain fronting from working. The time of the change is between 2018-04-13 14:00:00 and 2018-04-13 18:00:00, based on when the bandwidth graph of the Snowflake bridge 5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6915AB06BFB7F went to zero.
ticket
2018-04-05 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "April 3 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 8A53650327E8D30E971DC90F564BA9BD1A513F19, geoip6-db-digest 698852511F6BC27DFFC115805044C71FDCCF70AF).
commit
2018-04-02 to 2018-04-18 snowflake Accidentally misconfigured the 3 proxy-go instances that were meant to point to the new standalone broker so that they pointed to the old App Engine broker.
start end
2018-04-02 snowflake Reinstated periodic restarts of the fallback snowflake proxies.
comment
2018-03-27 snowflake Restarted the fallback snowflake proxies with no limit on memory.
comment
2018-03-26 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 8.0a5. Improves snowflake client performance.
blog post ticket
2018-03-23 snowflake Restarted the fallback snowflake proxies with a limit on resident memory (ulimit -m) rather than virtual memory (ulimit -v).
comment comment
2018-03-22 snowflake Provisionally increased memory limits of the fallback snowflake proxies to 400 MB, 800 MB, or unlimited.
comment
2018-03-22 snowflake Increased memory limit of the fallback snowflake proxies from 200 MB to 400 MB.
comment comment
2018-03-22 snowflake Disabled periodic restarts of the fallback snowflake proxies; gave them a memory limit of 200 MB.
comment
2018-03-16 snowflake Deployed another attempt to fix frequent crashes of the fallback snowflake proxies.
comment
2018-03-14 snowflake Deployed an attempt to fix frequent crashes of the fallback snowflake proxies.
comment commit
2018-03-12 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "March 8 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 0FD75C42A32E82100361BD367CB13862806E6A13, geoip6-db-digest 5AFA101C4A6AD4289CEE4575943D6BA851606245).
commit
2018-03-03 Release of tor 0.3.2.10, 0.3.1.10, and 0.2.9.15, which offer better resistance against DoS attacks.
blog post ticket
2018-02-27 to 2018-03-02 Less than 3 bandwidth authorities are available.
tor-relays
2018-02-12 Relays Tor 0.3.3.2-alpha reaches deb.torproject.org repositories
2018-02-11 Relays Tor 0.3.3.2-alpha reaches FreeBSD repositories
2018-02-10 Relays Tor 0.3.3.2-alpha is released (containing important denial-of-service migitations for relays)
blog
2018-02-08 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "February 7 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest FF83AD73DE7672C77EDF8888F4B241642C7C90F7, geoip6-db-digest B1CDBFEB7C88F82EF3B5289CAFEED1321FA4693F).
commit
2018-01-24 to present webstats Tor Browser update pings roughly halve, again. The beginning corresponds with the release of Tor Browser 7.5; however unlike with Tor Browser 6.5.2, there was no change to app.update.url this time.
ticket thread
2018-01-23 obfs4 Tor Browser 7.5 is released. It adds the default obfs4 bridge noisetor01:46089.
blog post
2018-01-20 Relays Some more directory authorities upgrade to 0.3.2.9 which enforces new requirements for the exit flag. ~50 relays lose the exit flag
tor-relays post
2018-01-18 to 2018-02-24 snowflake Outage of Snowflake broker caused by the disabling of the Let's Encrypt TLS-SNI-01 challenge.
ticket graph
2018-01-16 Tor 0.3.2.9 reaches deb.torproject.org.
relay versions graph
2018-01-08 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "January 5 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest ACE2AF82816B9D3F58FC9C79A41B4506D6DAD713, geoip6-db-digest 387B3F555F1E054F0F9971C726F49848C5B5CF8B).
commit
2018-01-05 to present Outage of the op-hk OnionPerf instance.
op-hk graph
2017-12-21 Release of tor 0.3.2.8-rc, intended to fix the KIST bug that enabled a DoS on relays by running them out of memory.
announcement ticket
2017-12-20 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "December 6 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 1D486694A710145631B295CC39ECC5682F75858C, geoip6-db-digest F33231CAC761A71F7C19273DB1E11CEE01E2D982).
commit
2017-12-16 to 2017-12-17 Bridges Unknown Drop in the number of measured bridges.
graph mailing list post
2017-12-12 to 2018-01-18 meek Outage of the meek.bamsoftware.com (unthrottled for public use), meek.bamsoftware.com:7443 (former meek-azure, now unused), and gaeuploader.meek.bamsoftware.com (used by GAEuploader) bridges.
2017-12-09 <OR> ipv6 Relays Release of Tor Browser 7.0.11, containing tor 0.3.1.9, which adds an IPv6 address for the bridge authority bastet.
blog post
2017-12-09 <OR> ipv6 Relays Release of Tor Browser 7.5a9, containing tor 0.3.2.6-alpha, which adds an IPv6 address for the bridge authority bastet.
blog post
2017-12-08 to 2017-12-11 Bridges The bridge authority was down for unknown reasons.
graph mailing list post
2017-12-04 to present DDoS attack creates load on the network.
tor-relays thread relay graph summary post ticket
2017-12-01 <OR> ipv6 Relays Release of tor 0.2.8.17, 0.2.9.14, 0.3.0.13, 0.3.1.9, and 0.3.2.6-alpha, which add an IPv6 address for the bridge authority bastet.
ticket blog post
2017-11-15 <OR> Relays Release of Tor Browser 7.5a8, containing tor 0.3.2.4-alpha, which adds a new directory authority bastet, and changes the IP address of the directory authority Longclaw.
blog post
2017-11-15 meek Outage of meek-amazon bridge.
ticket
2017-11-14 <OR> Relays Release of Tor Browser 7.0.10, containing tor 0.3.1.8, which adds a new directory authority bastet, and changes the IP address of the directory authority Longclaw.
blog post
2017-11-11 to 2017-11-12 Outage of the op-hk OnionPerf instance.
op-hk graph
2017-11-10 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "November 6 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest E3C910F3B2A6C916C7BE33A943091EF57048B72C, geoip6-db-digest E8BD5B2E6554C27F718F1222667C09680D75F799).
commit
2017-11-01 meek Turned off the old meek-amazon CDN endpoint d2zfqthxsdq309.cloudfront.net.
mailing list post
2017-10-25 <OR> Relays Release of tor 0.2.5.15, 0.2.8.16, 0.2.9.13, 0.3.0.12, and 0.3.1.8, which add a new directory authority bastet, and change the IP address of the directory authority Longclaw.
blog post Bastet blog post bastet ticket Longclaw ticket
2017-10-14 snowflake Activated client IP address statistics on the Snowflake server and standalone proxies.
comment
2017-10-05 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "October 4 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 3A59213E5CFEE380F544B72DC1105366C6BD1CDE, geoip6-db-digest 1B8C975E5C62CF0FB5B4E598AE27B7189952BB09).
commit
2017-10-04 fte Permanent hardware failure of default FTE bridge 128.105.214.161:8080.
comment
2017-09-15 to 2017-10-12 Outage of the op-hk OnionPerf instance. Reported timeouts on the tor network increased, download speed improved.
mailing list post torperf graph torperf-failures graph op-hk graph
2017-09-15 to 2017-09-16 Bridges The bridge authority was down due to an issue with its offline master key.
graph mailing list post
2017-09-14 to 2017-09-16 Bridges Outage of the bridge authority Bifroest.
2017-09-07 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "September 6 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 0CE9EA8882EDED265451C36B49AE7BBB06A11C16, geoip6-db-digest C4573496EBD1CC335843067107DA49E482568FF6).
commit
2017-09-02 to 2017-09-21 obfs4 Unknown About a 35% increase in obfs4 users before returning to normal. Happened in many countries. Other transports do not have it.
graph
2017-09-01 to 2017-09-20 obfs4 A flood of over 4,000 obfs4 bridges nicknamed "Machiavelli".
graph of number of bridges tor-relays post metrics-team thread tweet
2017-08-14 to 2017-08-15 Bridges Outage of the bridge authority Bifroest.
mailing list post mailing list post graph
2017-08-14 ipv6 obfs4 Unknown Jump in IPv6 users of the Lisbeth default obfs4 bridge.
comment
2017-08-10 to 2017-08-11 Outage of the op-hk OnionPerf instance. Reported timeouts on the tor network increased, download speed improved.
torperf graph torperf-failures graph op-hk graph
2017-08-08 snowflake Tor Browser 7.5a4 released, including Snowflake for macOS.
blog post
2017-08-03 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "August 3 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 75AABD32582AC554AF252DDC7BBBABE7C6F28B28, geoip6-db-digest A52EFFEF8CF6F3CAA8EBD34961361544E959FAE1).
commit
2017-07-31 to 2017-08-28 Unknown Directory authorities using 2× bandwidth.
mailing list post for start mailing list post for end post suggesting link to nl, ro, lt, sc increases
2017-07-29 to 2017-08-17 meek Outage of meek-amazon bridge, caused by an expired certificate.
Relay Search expired certificate new certificate
2017-07-07 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "July 4 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 3D04F191098640F2E03B4D5F7800088D14B7EC30, geoip6-db-digest A3649B9E909C59942FB3D8F874AB4BEA36E8BEC1).
commit
2017-07-04 to 2017-07-21 obfs4 Outage of default obfs4 bridge frosty.
mailing list post
2017-07-04 to 2017-07-21 obfs4 Outage of default obfs4 bridge dragon.
mailing list post
2017-07-02 deb.torproject.org upgrades from tor 0.2.9 to tor 0.3.0
relay versions graph tweet
2017-06-26 to 2017-07-02 obfs4 Outage of default obfs4 bridge dragon.
mailing list post
2017-06-26 to 2017-07-03 obfs4 Outage of default obfs4 bridge frosty.
mailing list post
2017-06-20 meek Outage of meek-azure bridge.
start end
2017-06-19 to 2017-06-23 obfs4 Outage of default obfs4 bridge dragon.
mailing list post
2017-06-18 to 2017-06-23 obfs4 Outage of default obfs4 bridge frosty.
mailing list post
2017-06-12 obfs4 Increased the file descriptor limit on default obfs4 bridges ndnop3 and ndnop5 from 4096 to 32768. They had been failing bootstrap attempts from a test location in the U.S. about 40% of the time.
graph showing failed connections
2017-06-09 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "June 8 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest AFD609025B66305AD9FA8E0B15AF4F2BC82271F1, geoip6-db-digest A69FD14ACE46EE695F589ACE0EB7B915285B51B4).
commit
2017-06-07 ipv6 obfs4 Tor Browser 7.0 released. Adds an IPv6 address for default obfs4 bridge Lisbeth. Adds new default obfs4 bridges frosty and dragon.
blog post IPv6 ticket frosty and dragon ticket
2017-05-25 obfs4 Set AssumeReachable 1 on the default obfs4 bridges cymrubridge31 and cymrubridge33 in an attempt to make them publish statistics.
mailing list post
2017-05-23 to 2017-06-13 obfs4 Default obfs4 bridge LeifEricson rejects connections due to a broken firewall forwarding rule. This didn't affect the bridges "real" obfs4 port, but it did affect the port at that time configured in Tor Browser.
2017-05-08 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "May 2 2017 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest B2E5105287668771E34A66F90B34982D419727EF, geoip6-db-digest 8DA8AC3C8158CBFDF7DB53BBF73338246872371A).
commit
2017-04-14 to 2017-08-20 <OR> Directory authority maatuska's bwscanner stops operating, leading to a drop in traffic on some relays.
tor-consensus-health post about start tor-consensus-health post about end tor-dev thread analysis

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