Not A Bug Followers missing after server restart

On March 18 (around 6 a.m. UTC), I logged into the game with all my followers, but after a short while the server just went down (Xen/Linux upgrade).
When it came back online, something weird happened, none of my followers were visible next to my character (all of them were dead). So I immediately went to the stable to check, and it was completely empty.
My character stats were showing 0/5 followers.

List of followers:
a doOb (travesty Dog)
a doOb (travesty Dog)
a doOb (travesty Dog)
These 3 dogs were dead for a long period before, since they were pretty useless they just sit dead somewhere.

Chief Paroxysmus' Swamp Dragon (never changed its original name)
Graphic: 0x031F
Color: 0x07A2
This was my character main mount, always using him but got killed by a boss at Leprechaun Event.

I will be glad if you can take a look to check if something weird or not planned happened,
Thank you.

The pets were cleaned up because they had been left in the world dead for quite some time.

In this specific situation though the server going down for over 7 hours made it impossible for the user to reclaim them correctly. By the time they logged back in the 24 hour mark had passed and the pets were considered abandoned and marked for deletion.

It is never recommended to leave dead bonded pets idle in the world for long periods of time especially because situations like this can arise.

To better safeguard against these situations though I have increased the timer to abandon dead bonded pets left in the world from 24 to 48 hours.

Because in this situation the server going down unexpectedly, and for a long period of time, I was able to restore the swamp dragon.

All in all though this was not a bug. The systems to removed orphaned pets is important and otherwise working as intended. Hopefully by doubling the delay this system will help others retain pets left dead in the world too long from being cleaned up, in the event the server goes down for unforeseen circumstances.