Thousands of magic prancing gnomes

Every time the realm dc's it still always shows thousands of people online on your website, do you guys have like 8k gm's all working ingame to get the game fixed during restarts? or are their thousands of magic gnomes who frollic around whenever all players dc. I guess we will never know...

they said multiple times already that the numbers on the webpage are not instant. They probably refresh after the server is already up again which makes it seem like some people didnt dc at all.