I was searching for a world for recording and tried to request back to my group on different instance but I did not recieve any notifications. Furthermore I also noticed my friend list did not show one of my friends active when they were in fact in the same instance as the rest and another friend I just friended did not show up at all. I had to restart the game and recieved a bomb of notifications as well as up to date friend list. Before any of this I have issues with my internet where it sometimes gets down for several seconds before it gets up and it so happened that my internet went down before.
I have a theory that when my internet went down and I was forced to rejoin, the database lost connection and either was unable to reconnect or did not attempt to. I don’t know how vrchat is built or how it works but I am pretty sure this is what happened. Alternatively it could be UI just not updating but I don’t believe it’s the case.