Facebook has announced that its Tor gateway will be down for one to two weeks due to an expired TLS certificate. This is a bit strange as it normally should not take two weeks to renew a certificate.
When using Tor to connect directly to facebook.com, Facebook will lock a user's account because it looks like they are coming from different countries each time they connect to the site. To Facebook, this would appear to be a botnet or other malicious activity and will cause the system to lock the account.
As a way of fixing this issue and to allow users to have a better experience when connecting via Tor, Facebook launched in 2014 the dedicated Tor address https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/. Using this onion site, Tor users could access the site directly without fear that their account would be locked out.
On December 13th, 2019, Facebook announced on their Facebook over Tor page that the facebookcorewwwi.onion Tor site would be unavailable for one to 2 weeks while they awaited the renewal of their TLS certificate.
Our onion service, facebookcorewwwi.onion, is temporarily unavailable while we await renewal of our TLS certificate. In the meantime, Facebook is still accessible via facebook.com using Tor Browser. We expect facebookcorewwwi.onion to be available again in one to two weeks. Thanks for your patience.
Users who attempt to connect to the site via Tor will be greeted with an "Unable to connect" message as shown below.
This has been met with both concern and skepticism as many users utilize Tor to bypass government censorship and one to two weeks to renew a TLS certificate seems like an unusually long time.
For now, if you want to use Facebook without your account getting locked and all the headaches that come with trying to unlock it, you will need to connect directly to facebook.com using a normal browser.
Comments
Demoguy - 1 year ago
They are probably attempting to regenerate the tor address again. Since if I remember correctly the address is actually part of the public key.