Died after going through nether portal, instantly suffocated in wall lost all items same happened to a friend

I was on a Minecraft world with a Nintendo switch user from my android phone, we were exiting the nether and our game wasn't loading. My friends game loaded and said that he suffocated in a wall and when he checked the chat log it said I had also suffocated in a wall. We were confused and started checking the walls around our nether portal but our items were not there. We went back into the nether to check but all our items were gone. We had full netherite gear and totems equipped but we were instantly killed and lost all this. Is this a bug or does it mean the portal glitched? Could we have suffocated in the portal block? I'm not sure but I hope Mojang can fix this.