The friends list pulls it's data from the list of IDs in the user's JSON object that gets returned on the user api call. Some of these IDs may produce 404 errors.

Whether these are deleted, banned, or for some other reason, no longer valid accounts, they will attempt to ping, and return nothing. The issue is that the friends list will still count it in the total friends listed.

This means that if you are pinging for users 30-40 on the website, and one of the users returns nothing, you will only be served 9 users, but the counter will tick up 10 users.

My friends list has 14 of these dead accounts. It's fine if there is a valid reason for them being there, but the website should display the correct number.