Both Blizzard and Relic, who together own almost the entire RTS market, used spacebar to jump to events. Having it bound by default to a function which actually interferes with your ability to respond to an event is not helpful for new players who instinctively hit spacebar when the alarm sounds. Even having spacebar bound to nothing by default for the time being would be superior.
So that's what happened! I pressed spacebar, see it didn't jump anywhere as I had intended it too, and then thought the UI had crashed or something (the camera tends to behave weirdly when zoomed all the way out, so I thought that too was a bug...).