Didn’t realise you were all on the 9am Volcano ride too until I saw a few of your messages pop up in between the talk about what constitutes a mountain in the Nederlands! I was only doing a gentle ride anyway. hovered around the 1500 mark out of 3500+ so well into mid-pack but just cruising until the KOM.
There was some speculation on the in game chat about the update meaning less avatars were visible to help it run smoother. I went from low 400’s to low 500’s in about 5 minutes then back to high 300’s just before the climb.
GPLlama mentioned it in his update video yesterday, the servers struggle with keeping track and letting every user see more than 500 riders at the same time, especially since the TDZ events are getting 3000-4000 entries on single events. They’ve limited it to you only seeing 150-300 depending on your computer’s graphics capability, it was particularly noticeable in the pens where there was an empty gap between the front and my group 2/3rds back. Seemed to cause some issues with placings round the volcano too at points where you could see the riders on other roads on the same ride. I went from 1400 to 700 to 3000 and back to 1400 in the space of a few seconds!
My guess would be that they are stressing the servers massively right now with loads of new users and everyone stuck inside, I read they’ve nearly doubled their user base in the last few months and everyone is on there more often too. I’ve certainly noticed some crazy-large numbers on the screen for Zwifters on compared to this time last year!