Unread item count disappearing

If I refresh the page, I can see that several of my feeds have a number of unread items in them. However, after about 10 seconds, all of the unread counts disappear and it looks like all of my feeds have been fully read.

The error appears to be caused by a call to /api/user/count. Calls to this API endpoint are returning the following data:

{ exitCode: 2, message: "Error while communicating with data repository!", info: [], data: [] }