If we take a look at the status page, we can see that almost 2000 new gateways were added on March 6.
Does anyone know how this happened?
Or is it just counted differently?
Are gateways that only peer via packet broker included in these statistics?
Maybe someone put a big order in for some.
All gateways, be it TTI clients, TTN community, or any other gateway working via packet broker
Actually if you look closely there werent 2k ‘new’ ones. 6th saw latest TTS update which may have impacted stats but there was actually a drop off of ~1k5 then recovery with the ~2k added. There were typically around 17k5-17k6 in the days running up and currently around 18k6-18k7. We see steps like this every so often were deployments happen or get recognised into the system - perhaps as part of new peering arangements. Some of the statistics here, on the main map (https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/map ), or at country or community local map levels, can be misleading, even deceptive, as they come and go being recognised under different statistical model. (Community maps often show (IIRC) gateways seen in last couple of weeks with those not seen for a couple of days changing colour before being aged off and disappearing after a few weeks with no updates (inc GW status msgs) - some of the GW’s listed on main map can be very old and may even reflect old V2 instances no longer visible under V3, some drifted off to other networks, and there are (too!) many that show on main map and suggest connected through PacketBbroker which arent then enabled for actual traffic peering with the community so best advice is use all with caution! (I know of one UK town/are with 125-150 Gw’s deployed and showing on PacketBroker but where the owner org has denied actual peering routing to TTN Community, despite my lobbying, such that there are only 2-6 showing (inc. one of mine) at any given time as Community GW’s come and go!). Besides the number of GW’s on stats page your can also see the associated ‘glitch’ in related traffic as they dropped and recovered 
Some GW’s may initially get routed and appear in GW stats but then the owners deny traffic (As example above) which may explain gradual reduction after over hours/days following the initial peak recovery… all speculation! 
Johan did some interesting stats analysis on ‘apparent’ TTN/PacketBroker GW’s which confirmed some of the historic ebbs and flows…
Perhaps @adrianmares or @KrishnaIyerEaswaran2 can shed some light?
Hey - this is a bit of a counting quirk on our side. In short, UDP gateways may end up being counted as being connected twice in some situations, and these situations occur during maintenance windows.
The Things Stack is highly available and we have multiple container instances available for failover, including during updates. UDP gateways don’t have connections per se, and during upgrades it is possible that the uplink flow is sent to one container, while the downlink flow is sent to another container. Our primitive counting does not deduplicate this situation and the result is this increase in the gateway count.
The numbers will slowly converge back to their old values. Future updates to TTS will also improve this situation, but dealing with UDP gateways is in general a terrible affair.
If you look at the map @Jeff-UK refers to it will tell you there are ‘98943 are connected via Packet Broker’.
So these are all the gateways ever connected to TTN/TTI and packet broker.
If you analyze the 98943 (don’t quote me on this number as it grows daily.
Last “updatedAt”:“2020” some 5005 of them.
Last “updatedAt”:“2021” some 34719 of them.
Last “updatedAt”:“2022” some 30739 of them.
Last “updatedAt”:“2023-01” some 2762 of them.
Last “updatedAt”:“2023-02” some 3562 of them.
Last “updatedAt”:“2023-03-01 → 07” some 1582 of them.
Last “updatedAt”:“2023-03-08” some 20574 of them.
There are a couple of factors to bear in mind with this.
I might have moved them to a different network.
I have a power issue in a remote location.
I made a bundle up when I move from V2 to V3.
I were experimenting and seeing if LoRaWAN will suit my application.
How does the network operator know it is temporary?
The bottom line, there are “online”:true about ~18 000 live gateways, this will fluctuate, due to power failures, back end failures, or people just moving off.
If I look at the gateways I monitor, the stack is extremely stable, even when a upgrade occurs
@adrianmares Do you know if Packet Broker announce when they are doing maintenance or upgrades?
We have a Status Page for Packer Broker so we should indeed make it a habit to more consistently announce updates/maintenances there.
We did some ops to flush the transient connections. Now the gateway numbers should be back to normal.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.