Joining on my favorite server (WOBO) after I had connectivity issues, I was suddenly no longer geared in Polana but fully wiped. Left the server and logged on again and was somewhere else entirely again.

Ran around for 20 minutes and did not find one item of loot.

Steam chat contacted another player and he had the same problem on my server.

I thought to myself, well this server is emptied out (usually it's pretty much full) so it seems to be the entire server.

All the other servers are almost devoid of players on a Saturday afternoon.
What's going on?