Genuine question: If the network is decentralized, how are they able to determine the amount of users on the system?

The article mentions opt-in usage reporting, but that would only indicate there’s around 115 million users actively reporting that they’re using it, right?

Agreed. And in a way, it is also a contributing factor to how polarizing internet-based discussion has become. Rather than show you the most cited websites for answering a political question, it’s going to use its profile of “you” to show you something you’re more likely to engage with.

Progress? Either that or their site got overloaded.

Exactly this. MECM even has this sort of feature built-in with Orchestration Groups. You can set group 1 to perform updates and reboot at a certain time, then group 2 will only begin its update/reboot cycle when group 1 has completed or crossed a certain threshold.