It was after. It was near the end of mining, the hashrate went insane. I mean utterly insane, I've never seen so many SCRYPT hashes in one place and there was a genuine cause for concern at the time. It was at around 4.5mil I think.
What is funny is people have no problem with changing coins to scrypt-n or x11 to combat the ASIC beasts but changing the number of coins or ending mining early to combat multipools? How dare they!