It's possible, but improbable. When a card is OIR'd into the switch, the bus is temporarily stalled until the OIR sequence is complete. If the card is not properly seated, the bus stall can become permanent. The supervisor will detect this condition and may reload the switch. However, this is a very rare situation, and is very difficult to trigger, even intentionally in a lab environment.
Of course once a switch reboots, STP will be recalculated as TCN's will be sent to all neighboring switches.
This is simply one possibility, and a deeper analysis would be needed to attempt to provide a root cause. I recommend opening up a TAC Service Request and attaching a show tech and logging buffer to start with.
