Visiting Twitter’s Tor onion web site will now present you a warning that its certificates has expired, and pushing ahead will simply ship you to an error web page. The Tor Venture, the non-profit org chargeable for sustaining software program for the Tor community, has confirmed to The Verge that Twitter’s onion web site “is not out there seemingly with no plans to resume.” Pavel Zoneff, the group’s communications director, mentioned: “The Tor Venture has reached out to Twitter to look into bringing the onion model of the social media platform again on-line. Individuals who depend on onion providers for an additional layer of safety and assure that they’re accessing the content material they’re searching for now have one fewer manner of doing so safely.” It is value noting, nonetheless, that you could nonetheless entry Twitter on a Tor browser. 

Twitter launched its Tor service in 2022, shortly after Russia blocked its folks’s entry to the web site. A Tor service lets you circumvent censorship and offers you the aptitude to go to a web based vacation spot even when it is supposedly restricted in your nation. It additionally protects you from surveillance, because of its anonymization options that encrypt your visitors. You should use it anyplace, however it’s maybe particularly useful to folks dwelling in nations with extra stringent censorship legal guidelines, together with North Korea and China. 

The corporate has but to announce whether or not it has any plans on reviving its Tor service. Alec Muffett, who helped Twitter’s engineers undertake Tor providers final yr, instructed The Verge that the folks inside the firm he interacted with “are all gone.” He added that he is fairly certain it’ll cease working completely “until Elon [Musk] takes an curiosity.”

Musk, who bought Twitter later in 2022, has laid off hundreds of employees since he took over, together with workers who supported his imaginative and prescient for the web site. CNBC reported again in January that just one,300 personnel have been left from the 7,500 individuals who have been working for Twitter earlier than it modified palms. Seeing as Musk appears to be specializing in monetizing Twitter in the mean time, and there are barely any workers left on the firm, its Tor service might stay unavailable for a very long time, if not for good.