At the same time that the Conservatives swept to power in the UK, with the spectre of the Snoopers' charter looming, the team behind the Tor Cloud project announced that it was discontinued.

Tor's cloud service helped users concerned about their pathway to access an uncensored internet via the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform.

The undertaking reached a dead-end as no one came forward to support and maintain the software behind the project. "We have tried to find a new maintainer for Tor Cloud for months, but without success. There have been offers to send us patches, but we couldn't find a Tor person to review and approve them."

Two major bugs meant that the project was in urgent need of attention; one of them, in the words of the former project managers of Tor, made Tor Cloud "completely dysfunctional".

Just over a hundred of these bridges currently exist and that number is expected to dwindle even further as the project reaches its end-of-life.

Tor, which is better known for its Onion browser (hence its name, The Onion Router), has grown in popularity as more online users looked for better privacy online.