These days, Torland is pretty full of users who are frustrated about websites banning Tor users, and/or trying to find convoluted workarounds for such bans. So I thought I’d share a more positive story.
At $DAYJOB we’ve been trialing Teelaunch for propaganda merchandise for about a year. It worked pretty well. Then in 2026 May, a refactor landed in production, and suddenly all the embedded images (mockups of our t-shirts, and images of blank t-shirts) weren’t loading. Fiddling around, I noticed that all of the affected images were hosted on AWS, and viewing the image URL directly yielded a “The specified bucket does not exist” error.
I had already had some pretty productive interactions with Teelaunch support, so I poked them via email about it in June. Confusion ensued, because they reported back that each of the images I flagged were loading fine for them. They asked for details on my browser, and I told them I was on Tor Browser, and that I wouldn’t be surprised if perhaps their website is relying on some API that’s disabled in Tor Browser. Teelaunch support asked if I’d be willing to try on Firefox or Chrome. I politely explained that I have a weird threat model (due to being a cryptography engineer) and that I wasn’t comfortable using a different browser (it was late July by the time I got back to them, due to unrelated meatspace delays on my end).
Teelaunch respected my threat model and downloaded Tor Browser on their end, and quickly confirmed that they could reproduce the issue. Teelaunch indicated that their developers were working on a fix. It took some time, but by early August, the issues were fixed, and images loaded in Tor Browser once again!
Huge kudos to Teelaunch for taking the bug report seriously, and putting in the effort to get it working again. And maybe this story will provide some inspiration to Tor users, that sometimes, if a company’s website is broken in Tor Browser, all you have to do is ask them nicely to fix it. 
