It's a natural reaction to the low price. Difficulty is dropping by about 300,000 tomorrow.
When difficulty gets low enough for $4/btc to be profitable again, hash rates will rise.
No it was a natural reaction to Deepbit, BTC Guild, and Slush being DDOS'd for hours... Those 3 pools make up a huge chunck of the networks hashing power.
Now the strange thing is, with the pools still somewhat crippled, blocks found had almost doubled...
Last 10
149112-149122
13/10/2011
12:11
3'634'799.20
x2.15
And 2/3rds of the hashrate on
http://bitcoinwatch.com/ is listed as other...