can someone tell me what a 0 block means in relation to the network?
It means that the block only has 1 transaction, which is the coinbase transaction that gives the block reward to the miner. It has not other transactions in it.Edit: To clarify, I have not noticed those 0 transactions blocks till recently, so it is possible this has existed since the beginning of mining.
It has been going on since Bitcoin began and has always existed. Just look at the first hundred or thousand blocks. They are all empty blocks because Satoshi was both the only person mining and the only person on the Bitcoin network. 
