I had the same complaint and Tracey (Taraka) Explained it like this.
There were issues with major spamming going on, and from it the site was experiencing a massive lag, as well as constant 'breaking' of certain aspects of the site, which, inevitably, ended up with massive influx of petitions and a host of more problems. SO they put up censor kitty that bans whatever IP address that is doing the spamming for a minute, to 'reboot' their IP, and stop the spamming.
Basically, to solve it, stop going so fast with your hot-key clicks, and you should be good...