Players in the same realm getting disconnected but still playing in the world?

I was just playing realm with my friends, and while we were playing, I was asking them questions about things that they needed, and offering for them to come get things from my chests, or to sleep. After some time, one friend said that they thought they were playing by themselves, and sure enough when we hit tab, we were all playing in the same world through realms, but everyone was by themselves. At no point did the game indicate that anyone got disconnected, so we were very confused. We reloaded the game, and all of us had lost significant progress. Has this happened to anyone else? We are experiencing this issue right after the 26.2 update, which leads me to believe it could be something with that? I was playing on realms just a few weeks ago and didn’t have any problems. Very strange!