So was it a planned stress test of Dash network or some 3rd party tried to attack it?
Link :
https://dashnews.org/dash-transaction-spike-uncovers-limitations-patched-in-new-0-14-0-3-release/it appears that the artificial load on the Dash network was either a stress test by someone outside of the Dash developer community or was an attempted attack.
Either way, i think it provided Dash Core Team a good opportunity to observe the impact and make adjustments where necessary.
Which is more difficult to simulate on Testnet, due to the limitations of Testnet.