I do hope it was an odd shenanigan but it could be what jagmeets suggests. FWIW, both of us were closely monitoring the captioned flight. It had Priority 2 and Priority 1 gradually open over the past few days, but on the very day this happened we snapped one seat by partner award (my own ticket), then saw standard redemption available on cx.com, but SO's booking was still waitlisted. Maybe something like partners and MPC/AM 'fresh' redemptions having it at 12mn, but waitlists not clearing til 9am (I called MPC at 8am hkt), but still not what's supposed to happen.

The agent was certainly surprised. Well, she also offered to open up a seat for SO on our desired connecting flight of choice (ha...giving it away...it's HKG-SIN A33P on Easter Monday afternoon, nice enough given the low seat count and 'peakness') but I declined as I didn't want to ticket and pay for SO's award just yet.

(to clear up the confusion, it's just SO connecting so that's why I grabbed the first segment from a partner alone.)