People aren't still giving them their votes to inactive witnesses. The votes don't time out or decay, they last forever! They gave them their vote once because they read a good post from then once upon-a-time-ago with a "vote for me" link at the bottom and haven't thought about it since (in many cases because the voter themselves are now also now inactive).

At the moment Steemit.com site seems normal. I don't normally interface with STEEM their but it still looks the same to me with the tags on the left (I don't look at them normally as they never seem to change and impart no useful "trending" information).

I still have my 301 followers and my 58 or so follows. I'd assume it's just a glitch related to adjusting the API back-end. I had notice the screwy account valuations previously. I figure that had something to do with a "glitch" in the 3rd party API they use to get that info. It is probably unrelated to these, more internal, issues.