In short the two drives in the array were /dev/sdd and /dev/sde. The kernel sees they were unplugged and have gone down as you can see below.
mdadm caught the first one being unplugged /dev/sde and disabled the missing drive. However when the final drive that was part of the array is unplugged it didn't notice at all. Instead it complains about an IO error later for drives that the kernel knows do not exist anymore.
[45817.162728] ata4: exception........