Number of Tor users recently halved

Tor moved the metrics to new servers and there was a temporary glitch in the metrics counting the relays. It's a metrics issue, not an actual change in the number of relays. https://twitter.com/torproject/status/664168624467386368

According to the metrics-team mailing list[1] it's likely due to an aborted cronjob and should be sorted out soon.

[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/metrics-team/2015-Nov...

If you break it down by country, you can see the same halving for every country. It is unlikely that a social reason behind this, or a botnet going down as someone has suggested. It is more likely an intentional or unintentional change in how the number of users are counted.

I wonder if it was a botnet going offline?

Q: Why do the graphs end 2 days in the past and not today?

A: Relays and bridges report some of the data in 24-hour intervals which may end at any time of the day. And after such an interval is over relays and bridges might take another 18 hours to report the data. We cut off the last two days from the graphs, because we want to avoid that the last data point in a graph indicates a recent trend change which is in fact just an artifact of the algorithm.

Q: But I noticed that the last data point went up/down a bit since I last looked a few hours ago. Why is that?

A: The reason is that we publish user numbers once we're confident enough that they won't change significantly anymore. But it's always possible that a directory reports data a few hours after we were confident enough, but which then slightly changed the graph.

from the Q&A https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git/tree/doc/users...

Is there something wrong with the counting, or is this an actual drop in users?

Can't know if this is indeed the case but quite a few tor alternatives are out there so this drop needn't be sinister.

This is seemingly tangential but when untargeted surveillance is used steganography beats encryption.