Tor Metrics
  • Metrics
  • Home
  • Users
  • Servers
  • Traffic
  • Performance
  • Onion Services
  • Applications
  • More
  • News
  • Sources
  • Services
  • Development
  • Research
  • About
Tor Metrics
  • Home
  • Users
  • Servers
  • Traffic
  • Performance
  • Onion Services
  • Applications
  • Home
  • Users

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
2019-08-06 to 2019-08-09 Experiment to test the accuracy of relays' advertised bandwidth estimation.
description of experiment post announcing start post announcing end advertised bandwidth graph relay flags graph
2019-07-27 snowflake The Snowflake proxy hosted at snowflake.torproject.org is updated, changing domains from bamsoftware.com to freehaven.net in order to work around the Google Safe Browsing block.
comment
2019-07-27 snowflake Deployed version 0.0.7 of the Snowflake WebExtension for Chrome, changing domains from bamsoftware.com to freehaven.net in order to work around the Google Safe Browsing block.
comment
2019-07-26 flashproxy snowflake Cupcake 2.0 is released, now working with Snowflake rather than flash proxy.
Chrome Web Store page
2019-07-26 snowflake Deployed version 0.0.8 of the Snowflake WebExtension for Firefox, changing domains from bamsoftware.com to freehaven.net in order to work around the Google Safe Browsing block.
comment
2019-07-23 snowflake The broker domain name snowflake-broker.bamsoftware.com is blocked by Google Safe Browsing, preventing the Snowflake web browser extension from working.
ticket comment noting decrease in proxies
2019-07-09 obfs3 Release of Tor Browser 8.5.4 and 9.0a4. Removes the last remaining default obfs3 bridges.
8.5.4 blog post 9.0a4 blog post issue #31055 issue #31058
2019-07-03 snowflake Deployed version 0.0.1 of the Snowflake WebExtension for Chrome.
comment
2019-06-26 snowflake Deployed version 0.0.1 of the Snowflake WebExtension for Firefox.
comment
2019-06-20 obfs4 A call to set up new obfs4 bridges is posted to the tor-relays mailing list.
mailing list thread thread continues
2019-06-11 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "June 10 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest A131E1F283F4AD307248B03A70B0413E81ADF2A4, geoip6-db-digest 0EFF3EE1E22927EC9A77BFFAFD703F3A5B32FA79).
commit
2019-05-28 Failure of network equipment at site of op-ab OnionPerf instance (equipment now replaced)
onionperf timeouts graph
2019-05-22 fte Release of Tor Browser 9.0a1, removes support for FTE.
blog post ticket
2019-05-17 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "May 13 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 35DFDA2D06D2A0467EF37D60A67B438B11952B74, geoip6-db-digest C0193A1D086819353FABBF70AADB15866B7B2525).
commit
2019-04-29 Network equipment failure at site of op-ab OnionPerf instance
performance graph
2019-04-16 snowflake Outage of Snowflake fallback proxy-go instances, caused by a failure to restart after segregating old logs.
ticket
2019-04-03 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "April 2 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 62A97D4DEBF76A5CE5C232B95BBF05B191EB8AAA, geoip6-db-digest 66620E57A8427C53D6084B3229807DC320CDC3D0).
commit
2019-03-22 snowflake Outage of the Snowflake broker, caused by a full disk.
ticket
2019-03-06 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "March 4 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 5B90C2F06292D8237A5C77E27ED4ABABF4AE0684, geoip6-db-digest E971FCA4A89F6C685928FF9371D1BF7A2484F4CA).
commit
2019-02-12 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "February 5 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest DDAA25B4425EAA45EE8E92A6531CD3246C8E989A, geoip6-db-digest 0368FA722D90026E60BD60A26F615791A7A53D21).
commit
2019-02-07 snowflake Disabled the 3 proxy-go instances that were pointing at the former broker hosted on App Engine.
comment
2019-01-30 to 2019-04-07 webstats Unknown Tor Browser update pings drop temporarily. A similar effect is present in other years.
graph issue metrics-team thread
2019-01-07 Bridges Release of tor 0.3.5.7, 0.3.4.10, and 0.3.3.11. Fixes the bug, present since 0.3.5.1-alpha/0.3.4.1-alpha, of idle bridges being unuseful.
comment ticket blog post ticket
2019-01-07 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "January 3 2019 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 2B8A70B399CF8B471289A4DB52947DE965D8DE5F, geoip6-db-digest FEA33E6F398DF67252F41DDD3D010E69B33D544E).
commit
2018-12-05 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "December 5 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 0684E08BDC01ABB41A717E9C55BDEB21531CFAC8, geoip6-db-digest AFFAD1475879D57B1C1EA119141EFA0E57547290).
commit
2018-11-26 to 2018-11-28 Outage of the onionperf-us instance, caused by a Greenhost east coast VPS migration.
mailing list post
2018-11-26 to 2018-11-28 flashproxy Outage of the flash proxy badge hosting server, flashproxy.bamsoftware.com, caused by a Greenhost east coast VPS migration.
2018-11-19 to 2018-11-27 Slow-running processes on the metrics host cause an observed drop in the overall relay bandwidth graph.
mailing list thread
2018-11-16 to 2018-11-22 snowflake A full disk stops the Snowflake bridge and fallback proxies from working.
ticket
2018-11-11 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "November 6 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 603BE8A0CA1B7164D76DBC75A280C9CA0A556F65, geoip6-db-digest 1CEF662539C0D91EC07A7C5C13134E3317B451E4).
commit
2018-10-25 to 2018-10-28 Relays Gap in observed number of relay users, caused by the estimated fraction of reporting relays exceeding 100%.
metrics-team post ticket graph archived graph
2018-10-10 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "October 9 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 76907A8345DA84CC724CDD573B6E08F6A089FEEB, geoip6-db-digest 5852AB4D3A96D7526DD47D5573CB4FA32BE4ECEB).
commit
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
2018-09-18 Bridges Release of tor 0.3.5.1-alpha, containing a bug that makes idle bridges unuseful.
2018-09-11 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "September 6 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest C9118A0D763E069B890674A4D5000A3DB846746B, geoip6-db-digest 8A46B41B2AE16F3705C67DEECD20EAA50B043A51).
commit
2018-09-10 Bridges Release of tor 0.3.4.8, 0.2.9.17, 0.3.2.12, and 0.3.3.10. 0.3.4.8, containing a bug that makes idle bridges unuseful, becomes the stable release.
blog post
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
2018-07-13 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
2018-05-17 Bridges Release of tor 0.3.4.1-alpha. Has a bug that makes idle bridges unuseful.
ticket ticket
2018-05-15 ipv4 ipv6 geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "May 1 2018 Maxmind GeoLite2 Country" (geoip-db-digest 765D2F123DDA7DAEA9C9263975E2B4BAFBD2B908, geoip6-db-digest 2AA568CC898BF9924FBACEA26946AA7ED10E7D87).
commit
2018-05-14 meek Disabled the d2cly7j4zqgua7.cloudfront.net CDN endpoint for meek-amazon.
Tor Browser ticket Orbot ticket
2018-05-09 snowflake Release of Tor Browser 8.0a7, which changes the default Snowflake rendezvous to use an Azure domain front, instead of the Google one that had been non-functional since 2018-04-13.
blog post ticket
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
2018-03-28 to 2019-07-13 Chad Chad blocks social messaging apps.
article about end article about end graph
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 2018-04-05 webstats Unknown Tor Browser update pings drop temporarily. The beginning of the drop corresponds with the release of Tor Browser 7.5; however unlike with Tor Browser 6.5.2 in 2017, there was no change to app.update.url this time.
graph issue metrics-team thread
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
2018-01-05 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

© 2009–2023 The Tor Project

Contact

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.