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Just now, whenever someone stars any message in the C++ room, the list of starred and pinned messages disappears.
This seems to happen across all browsers for all currently active participants in the C++ room.
None of us is in any other room, so we don't know whether this is all across chat.stackoverflow.com.
For some reason (yet to be determined) the clock on the database server was ~20 minutes off. Since the sorting of the starred messages is based on the hacker news hotness algorithm, which as a factor includes the message age raised to a fractional power, to be precise:
(age in minutes + 2) ^ 1.5
the database threw a floating point error when the message had a "negative age" due to the clock being wrong (raising to a non-integer power only works for non-negative bases).
