Tor has more than three times as many users from Ukraine since the start of the conflict

Tor has seen more than three times as many users from that country at peak times since the start of the armed conflict in Ukraine. The service makes it possible to redirect internet traffic allowing a user to surf the internet almost completely anonymously.

On an average day, roughly 40,000 clients connected to Tors servers. In the run-up to the Russian invasion, the number of users from Ukraine rose to a peak of 150,000 users within days, according to figures from the service. Tor has taken the number of directly connected clients for its stats and does not include users connecting through a non-public bridge server; in the case of Ukraine, the number of users through such a connection is negligible.

Bridge connections make it possible for blocked users to still establish a redirected Internet connection via Tor relays. That has become even more relevant in Russia in recent months. Under Putin’s rule, the use of the Tor Project was banned in late December, Reuters reported at the time. According to the Russian authorities, the use of the anonymized internet service made it possible to “access illegal content”.

Since Tor was banned in the country, the number of users has halved. The fact that more than 150,000 clients are still using the service is at least partly due to a Russian blog post in which the nonprofit explains how users can bypass the blockade over a bridge connection. That clearly worked, because Tor registered an average of more than 10,000 bridge users before the blockade and between 27,000 and 47,000 after the blockade.

In its own words, Tor basically does not register how many users it gets from specific countries. The nonprofit makes an approximation of the number of users based on the amount of clients making requests to update directories. Only a portion of all directory requests contain anonymized information about the country from which the user is sending a request.