BTW, where do you get your chain and difficulty info from, your mining logs?
SGminer shows the actual and last 5-6 blocks difficulty, and it can log too. Btw. today 2 AM CET the difficulty also went to 11M from 29k, and the blockchain has stopped. Before this the block time was very low, 1-2 seconds. Imho someone stressed/attacked the AIDEN with an extreme mining power (maybe mining farm?) and the system's KGW responsed with these high difficulties.