Thanks for your suggestions.
Well, difficulty reset to 1.000 happens all the time since Gavin made that change years ago; when the most recent block is more that 20(?) minutes old. Long forks also happen quite often on testnet, but I don't recall such a CPU-intensive one. I will have to put more computers online with BIP101 compiled in.
It might be the usual reset yes. Its hard to tell because AFAIK there is no way to access infos without having a BIP101 client. If/when you have anything from "the other side of the fork" the other thread would greatly benefit from any information.