Well then I would say the management prioritizing features over bug fixes are incompetent and should be fired immediately.. if that is the case.
Sometimes it works like this:
Market department is visiting a customer/client, and if they accept it will be a large sale with multiple licenses as well as several "hours" of implementation Consulting. Though, when they talk to the client, they mention "it's a pity your system doesn't have feature <x>, if it did then we'd sign the contract tomorrow". Marketing people then says, "oh, of course our system has feature <x>, it's not fully implemented yet but it will be in the next release, the one we will install at your site".
Customer signs the order... and the developers gets a new direction: "Stop any non-crucial fiddling immediately. We need need feature <x> implemented immediately, our marketing department needs to know: can you do it in 4 or 8 weeks?"
Another thing is that the lost friend request probably is the way the system is designed. To sum it up, I Think the problem is that when they redesigned hte messaging center, they had two forks of the friend request. One that is a message, goes into message center system and is supposed to be handed there. Then the other "data fork" where the friend request goes into the database to keep track on at a lower level if a friend request is sent. However, there is no UI to handle the problem if the friend request is deleted in messaging system but is still stored in the database. In a way it's no bug, bur rather a missing system. To solve this, maybe the new friend request system needs to be somewhat redesigned - maybe adding a UI to the database fork of the friend request, to list all pending friend requests, and to delete (and possibly accept them).
If the solution is to add a UI to the "friend request database", then probably an update of the client is needed. A workaround wouldn't need a server-down: One half-dirrt way to solve this could be to run a program on the servers that automatically removes pending friend requests after say 2 weeks.
