Had a hiatus from chess for a while and since I've been back my Chess.com rating has shot up rather alarmingly.

Not really seeing much improvement in my play (Computer still reels back in horror analysing a lot of my moves) yet I'm beating players with a much higher rating than I previously managed.

Pure curiosity, any feedback welcome.

Well, in that Hiatus you took alot more players became members. Meaning the pool of players has increased and even if you are just a class A or B player that will put you far above the great majority of the new-comers therefore your rating will increase.

You said you're beating higher-rated players, Bryan. These can't be newcomers as you yourself are rated 1940+. You must have become better whatever the computer analysis indicates. The computer can't understand creative moves that fall outside the pale of conventional moves, and apparently neither do your opponents. This unconventionality could be the reason for your success. All the more reason to play without databases ...

Inflation has been rampant over the last half year, especially in bullet.  That said, I'm not sure if it's much of a problem, or even one at all, and I'm definitely unsure as to how one could "fix" it.  I think the main thing is to not consider them as necessarily indicitative of one's USCF or FIDE rating.

There has been inflation of ratings in Live Chess recently, particularly on bullet. The turn-based ratings were inflated even before that but I am not aware that they became more so lately.

the ratings inflation here is bad.  people like to point out that you can't compare across ratings pools... USCF and chess.com are apples and oranges.  but here you really can't even compare within the same pool.  I've gone up around 200 points in the last few months... no way I've actually gotten 200 points better.  The fact that ratings here can't even be used as a measure of your own progress indicates to me that this ratings system is broken, and they are largely useless.