Did you try putting it in the second spot or try adding a second barrell? We had a similar issue, and we assumed it was due to the damage amount as our first barrell was badly damaged, so we added a second that was only worn and it showed up as expected under the empty space.

This is not a bug, this is intended action. You have to place fat into the pan with the meat to prevent it from burning.

If this was happening right after the server update, and shortly after your server restarted and players started logging in, this is because of your server doing the world updates processing. There was a MASSIVE amount of content added, both items that we can interact with, as well as environmental additions such as new boulders, vehicle spawn locations, combine wrecks, water tank trailers, tractors, et cetera. Yor server was lagging because is it processing this new data and populating the server with it. We were experiencing this same issue 24 hours ago when we were on shortly after the game update.