There is a sudden cut down of peerCount

When I was tracking the peers count, there is a sudden cut down of peerCount occasionally.

For example: the /v2/status showed more than 10K active peers, minutes later, it became only about 4K. data shows here:

I investigated deeper, and it seems that not only my node, seed nodes like 35.178.61.73 happens too.

Any idea?

Regards, Liu Yang

Maybe because the miners are no longer running the nodes because they are now using a pool.

thanks that is a reasonable direction