There seems to be a sudden sharp increase in direct Tor users in Germany (+1.5M) over the span of this month:
(From metrics.torproject.org)
I looked at the metric for many other top relay countries but only Germany stood up with this sharp increase. What event could’ve triggered this?
The eye-balled date is 2023-06-10.
Looking at the count for all countries, it also increases by 1.5M, so Germany is solely responsible for this
I’ve looked at the news for around that period. Couldn’t find much. I also thought it may be somehow related to the release of Conjure, but it was at the very start of June, and there are no German IP addresses involved.
Still growing, based on my very rough calculations, now the increase for all users is ~2.375M, but for Germany it’s ~2.17M, so ~200 000 are coming from other countries now.
I checked top-10 countries by relay users, and some other ones, and haven’t found any that have growth that is as outstanding as it is for Germany.
For the countries that I checked the change in users seems to be within their normal fluctuation range.
Also here’s a chart of downloads, the peak (2.5x increase) is at 2023-06-10, as I said, and the growth starts between 2023-06-06 and 2023-06-08. I’m not sure if this is the only reason for the growth of Tor users from the initial post.
Hi! We have a ticket to analyze this spike:
@WofWca not so fast:
Also I see suspicious activity on my Guard relay:
I wonder if these events are related.
