Why is network so slow today?

[AriBitcoin]

I had sent a transaction with a decent fee of $16 (190 sat/byte, which would get the transaction confirmed within 1-2 blocks normally) around 14 hours back. The transaction is still unconfirmed and the current Blockchain.info shows that more than 200K transactions are unconfirmed.

What is wrong with the network today?

[Herbert2020]

price has been rising like crazy, that means a large number of people will be transferring bitcoin, either from their wallets to exchanges in order to sell while the price is high or have bought bitcoin at some price and now want to cash it out to their wallets (cold storage). and that leads to a large number of unconfirmed transactions (currently at 220,000 transactions) and since block size is limited and still is small at about 1.1-1.2 MB they will all be stuck.

this creates competition over that limited block space, and the competition is with paying higher fee.