We identified the issue as being related to the nostr.band relay, which seems to have succumbed to the zombie apocalypse. We've removed this relay from our defaults and optimized the relay set further to prevent unresolved user profiles from appearing.
But imagine you followed 800 and 25% or more of them were mindless cadavers roaming the landscape, eating up bandwidth and forcing every relay to store your bloated follow list each time you published an update.
#PlebsVsZombies removes your dead follows so you don’t have to carry them around with you forever.