My radar only shows three steps (BUG, not help needed with tracking)

EVEN NEWER UPDATE: Niantic CEO Jonn Hanke has said at San Diego comicon that they're aware of the 3-step bug and working to fix it. My pet theory is that they disabled more detailed tracking because it was using up server resources really inefficiently, and what they're actually doing is rewriting the tracking code and testing it.

NEWER UPDATE: Have heard no more about the previous update. Less inclined to believe it than I was, due to no recent occurrences of interest.

UPDATE: Apparently Niantic are aware of the issues and have made good progress towards getting them fixed...they just have really bad PR. Take with a grain of salt (it's not like I have an inside source or anything), but honestly this is where I'd have guessed they'd be at with it anyway.

So, while I was out this evening my radar started showing all Pokemon as three footprints away. I would have things actually spawn while the radar still shows them as three steps away (they did disappear from it after being caught), which I presume is not intended behaviour.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this? Restarting the app and phone didn't help. (iOS 9.x, iPhone 6S)

EDIT: Might be a server issue, I guess? It depends how the footprints are generated. But it's hard to see it being a client-side problem when the client didn't change before it bugged out.

Additionally, the order of Pokemon doesn't appear to update once they have appeared on the radar at all...this is why they seem to be out of order and you encounter things half way down the list

ADDITIONAL: Apparently some users are experiencing a total lack of nearby Pokemon entirely...this seems rarer, but is probably related.

ADDITIONAL ADDITIONAL: I was PMed by Oshava that since this coincided with the other bug of location info not being displayed (it shows a white rectangle instead of the map), it suggests they're having issues with the ability to process location data properly (which is leading to being unable to update the radar correctly). Sounds like a pretty reasonable theory to me, especially as things are showing up in a specific but wrong order in the radar (stuff shuffles around so it's clearly ordering it SOMEhow, but the ordering has been shown to be wrong in several cases). Keep me updated with any additional information!