It might be some sort of excuse... Who knows.
I did think of a possible re-implementation for the timer that wouldn't cause a bug (or at
least, I don't think it will)
Essentially, the server keeps track of the finish time/date, and the game counts down to that, displaying the finish time minus the current time. (The client obviously would have to query the server for the current time, to prevent glitching it out.) As no values would actually be changed, there would be no cause for any increase in time.

