Edit: LOL. I just noticed that it's a fake counter.
The statistics displayed on freebitco are updated once per hour and if you refresh the page, you will see that the numbers change to the same amounts as they were after the latest update.
If you don't refresh the page, the numbers will just increase indefinitely.
Read TheQuin's post.
The stats page is cached on Cloudflare and it updates hourly. The counter just runs at the current rate of increase so when you refresh the page you go back to when the page was last updated.
The same is true with lottery tickets. Like when they were frozen/unearnable, it would count up but you could refresh the page and it would always start counting from 26281 again.