The Tor Project has discontinued the Tor Cloud project due to a lack of dedicated software developers and maintainers.
The Tor Cloud project started in late 2011, aiming to provide a user‑friendly way of deploying bridges (i.e., Tor does not include them in the main directory) on Amazon EC2 to help users access an anonymous Internet.
Those users who would build such a bridge would provide an effective bandwidth to the Tor network, which would make it faster and more secure for all users.
Unfortunately, the project cannot continue to run as it has until now. The Tor Project knows that it is not capable of providing quality maintenance to avoid serious flaws, and it was unable to find a new maintainer.
«There is at least one significant bug in the Tor Cloud image that makes it completely dysfunctional (meaning that users would not be able to use this particular service to access the Internet), and there are more than a dozen other bugs, and at least one of them is high priority. Possibly as a result of these bugs, the number of Tor Cloud bridges has steadily decreased since early 2014,» they explained.
«There have been offers to send us the patches, but we wouldn't be able to find a «Tor person» to review and approve. We encourage each person who started their own cloud bridges project with another name», they said. The «Tor Cloud remains a good idea, but it needs the person who will implement it.»
Since new Tor Cloud instances cannot be organized in this way, the existing ones will remain intact, according to their statement. Also, those who want an instance on Amazon EC2 or any other cloud computing platform can do so, only they will have to install the Tor bridge manually.
