The Tor Project has retired a tool linking the anonymity service with Amazon Web EC2 because of a shortage of people willing to maintain the "bridge" to the cloud hosting platform.
Tor Cloud, which allowed people access to an uncensored Internet, was said to be riddled with bugs by the end of its life, one of which rendered the entire service dysfunctional.
Writing on the project’s blog, Karsten Loesing, metrics researcher and developer at Tor, said: "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."
Amid the closure of the project Tor is encouraging others to create their own cloud bridges, and even fork the Tor Cloud code, which will remain available for the time being.
"Tor Cloud is still a good idea, it just needs somebody to implement it," Loesing said.
Other bridges for Tor are also available online, including projects such as Ansible Tor and cirrus, and it will still be possible to create instances on cloud computing platforms Amazon EC2 and install a Tor bridge manually.
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The project curator was also keen to emphasise that the Tor Cloud cancellation had no effect on existing instances.
"Whenever one of those instances was started, a template of the operating system and settings was copied, and removing the template has no effect on the copies," Loesing said.
"Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this."
