[tor-talk] Surge in Users

[Öyvind Saether]

> Do you know why relay users have increased rapidly? What do you think?
> 
> The increase mostly came from Iran and Russia.
> 700K of the increase happend in Iran.
> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2019-03-04&end=2019-06-02&country=ir&events=points

Are those actually relay users? It doesn't look that way. That
hockey-stick graph simply does not look like organic growth. 

There's 82 million people in Iran which means that one in a hundred
people is now using Tor in Iran - according to that chart. That's
highly unlikely unless the state media announced explicitly told people
to use Tor time and time again. It seems much more likely that there is
something else going on.