Bitcoin Node Numbers Fall After Spam Transaction 'Attack'
"The number of reachable nodes has declined further following an "attack" that overloaded the bitcoin network.
Last week, an unknown actor sent a deluge of spam that left bitcoin's nodes the clients that store and relay transactions with upwards of 88,000, or 1GB worth, waiting in their collective memory pool.
[...]
By Thursday, node numbers on tracking service Bitnodes had dropped 10%."
source: coindesk