I recently got a surge from Singapore and heard a lot more peeps in my circle of friends saying the same thing...

It'll be the Chinese. The big Chinese cloud providers have data centres in Singapore for some reason. My Chinese mobile phone sends all it's telemetry back to Singapore, not mainland China.

for some reason

It's outside the great firewall. No requirements to hand over SSL keys to China. I worked for companies that ran into these challenges and solutions.