So you were working on the circuit, cutting tracks, while it was still powered up? That's not wise. At these voltages I don't think you could injure yourself, but you could easily damage components. Always work on a circuit with the power disconnected.
As others have pointed out, the shift registers are receiving power through the esp pins, phantom powering, which could damage the shift registers and/or the esp. Never apply a voltage to any pin of any chip that is higher than the Vcc voltage on that same chip. That's when phantom powering occurs, because of the Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) protection diodes built into chips to protect them during handling.