(David Fifield) The number of users of the snowflake-01 bridge remained stable throughout August 2023—until a small change near the end of the month.

Between 2023-08-27 and 2023-08-30 there was an outage at the snowflake-02 bridge. While that bridge is not directly depicted on these graphs, the outage indirectly caused an observable effect at the snowflake-01 bridge. At the beginning of the outage, users that might have connected to snowflake-02 instead went to snowflake-01, causing an increase. After the outage, users at snowflake-01 decreased as some users went back to snowflake-02. You can read more details at a post at the Tor anti-censorship team mailing list.

Here we can see that different countries were affected unequally. Most Snowflake users in Iran are already on the snowflake-01 bridge, so the snowflake-02 outage did not affect them as much. Users in Russia in China tend to use the snowflake-02 bridge more, so more of them got shifted to snowflake-01 during the outage.