Someone was talking on TS about this earlier today and said that they reduced the number of boxes they had propping the game up not sure where they heard/read that.
This is stated by Dev Zoom here.
I can support the feeling of lagspike and as servers didn't move just reduce number of servers it seems that server might now faster produce a spike, that was earlier usual to real high load consuming tasks. But as number of players did decrease this should be roughly similar to the time with far higher activity just beeing now far more often, than we were used to the last 12 month.