Just what the title said. Cleared status with ‘status’ and then I look like this:
…and then subsequent status sets stack up at the bottom!
Very odd. no console messages.
Edit: I appear to be able to do this at will.
This is also happening with help text for me, but it seems not for others.
Interesting!
Most likely it is due to your computer’s clock being ahead of the clock on the server.
Details
What Status message ... and help text has in common is that they are not events sent from the server, but just messages added to the chat log by the client. When the client adds a message (unlike server sent events), it puts a timestamp on it based on the computer’s clock.
The chat log is then sorted by timestamp, so newer messages ends up at the bottom, even if the messages didn’t arrive in that particular order.
Solution
I will make sure client-added messages always has a newer timestamp than the oldest previous message, just to prevent this behavior.
Thanks for the report @Talon! 
Oh! I think I know why then!
I had a strange clock problem last night, where I was ~1 hour ahead of actual time. I fixed it, which probably meant the time for the notices got desynced somehow. They were from the future. 
(I started syncing my laptop via NTP with the time server I have in the basement so that… shouldn’t happen again when I’m at home. )