We could blame a lot of things for the "strange" events. Case in point, the fact that even at lowest settings, zero effects and antialiasing off, and every external window closed... I STILL only manged 7fps. These oddities could easily be blamed on the lag that simply exists when 600 vessels are engaging in combat in the same system.
One of the carriers was destroyed, which I participated in. When I tried to engage Slave, however, we managed to get the carrier down to 50% structure before it literally just "left" the grid. Lots of people were left scratching their heads. I'm unsure of the fate of the third carrier.
Admittedly, the "uplinks" might have been a critical storyline point, necessitating the need for CCP to use some smoke and mirrors to accomplish them despite our intervention. There would have been plenty of ways to achieve this, however, without robbing players of important kills - if that's indeed what they did. Again, we might have all been lagging to hard to meet the countdown to Slave's jump succeeding. :/