Did something happen to EVE Online while I was away on vacation?

I tried running missions the last two nights and the responsiveness of the game was such that I had to give up on one mission and a ship was lost on another.

Okay, it was Gaff’s Carcaral blew up, not my Raven.  That will teach him to follow me into level 4 missions.

But he lost his ship sitting there waiting for his warp drive to engage.  The classic “waiting for the warp drive active indicator to hit the end of its sweep” routine.

He picked up aggro from a battlecruiser.  I tried to switch targets to either distract the battlecruiser or blow it up (they don’t last long when I focus my Raven on them), but the response time for modules at that moment was running at about 20-30 seconds between clicking and activation.

I watched his shields go.  I watched his armor go.  I watch his hull diminish.  Then he was just an egg in space.

At about that point my first cruise missile headed off towards the battlecruiser in question.

I told him to stay put and collect the bounties as I slowly finished off the remaining targets, including a battleship with a 900K prize on its head.

In the end, with insurance, bounties, and the mission reward, he probably came out a bit ahead in ISK, but what a pain all the same.

And yes, this was in Lonetrek, depressingly close to Jita, so there were 150 people in the same system while we were running the mission, but we were ran a few missions before I went on vacation without any problems and the same mass of people in system.

This morning I got an IM from Gaff, who was off mining.  He said that the lag was pretty bad even for that.  Opening containers and moving ore was lagging quite a bit.

He was headed off to Amarr space, to our old HQ out there, to see if things were less lagged.  Initial reports were positive, but the system was still short of peak hour at that point.

So what gives?