But they're not authoratitave servers that calculate weapon impacts, damage and player position. They're transaction servers that deal with, among other things, bulletin board missions, financial transaction management, and matchmaking to instances.
Wellington is right.
The issue last night was with the matchmaking server, I believe. I was in a wing in a system with three comrades. Our transitions between SC and normal space were taking minutes, and although the wing remained intact, we kept ending up in separate instances in SC. Sometimes we were approaching the same planet and would be dumped into separate instances when we dropped. On onther occasions we would jump to SC at the same time but end up in different instances in cruise.
What has that got to do with the long jump times that we're talking about?
You can see when watching the network traffic there needs to be server communication (a transaction) to finish the jump. He said there were no servers.