I'm not sure if this goes under technical issues, but wasn't sure of where else to put it.
Last night I was playing with a friend in one of the zombie tier 3 areas. I picked up the key, which summoned all the zombies, and then suddenly hit lag (real lag, as I was down to 1 red bar, not graphical lag). I tried to put the key down and it got stuck to the back of my character. I couldn't raise my shield or attack, and only after my lag normalized did my character put down the key.
Its probably too late now, but an F2 bug report would had been warranted, and reviewing projectx.log may had noted something. But based on what your describing, the clockwork instance might had encountered some kind of fault and was trying to recover (hard to tell what its capable of).