Tor Project Says Number of Available Servers for Relays and Bridges in Tor Network Has Declined

The Tor browser, arguably the best privacy-protecting Internet browser for most people, is seeing a reduction in the number of bridging servers, and the reduction in servers is affecting the browser's ability to provide dark web services.

The Tor anonymity network consists of a relay and an exit node, where the exit node will communicate with the real Internet, the relay is between the user's computer and the exit node, and the bridge is a non-public Tor relay designed to evade blocking.

In a blog update posted this week, the Tor Project, a nonprofit organization that maintains and develops Tor software, said it currently has about 1,200 bridge servers or bridges, 900 of which support the obfs4 obfuscation protocol. Bridges are private servers that provide access to users living in places where the Tor network is blocked. tor provides anonymity to users by connecting to servers via multiple relays, in some cases through multiple countries/regions.

That said, it should be noted that Tor is not only used by people who do not have free access to the Internet in their country/region, but also by people who want to hide their IP address or do not want their browsing activity tracked.

The Tor Project says the number of bridges operated by volunteers has been decreasing since the beginning of the year.

"Having these current bridges is not enough: eventually, all bridges will find themselves on the blocked list." The Tor Project said in its blog post. "Therefore, we need a steady stream of new bridge servers that are not yet blocked anywhere."

According to the Tor Project's metrics, the top five countries where users have connected via the bridge from mid-August to now include (in order of users) Russia, with an average of 12,480 users per day; the United States, with an average of 10,726 users per day; Iran, with an average of 3,738 users per day; Germany, with an average of 2,322 users; and Belarus, with an average of 1,453 users.

To address the declining number of bridge servers, the Tor Project is launching a campaign to bring 200 obfs4 bridges online by the end of the year. It's offering a modest "reward kit" for volunteers who run the bridge server for at least a year, including a Tor hoodie, T-shirt, and stickers. (Remember, this is a non-profit organization). The program will end on January 7, 2022.