That is strange. I would have thought that the students would have been regularly following up on their orders after having placed them with companies.
To my knowledge, one major flaw in the system was that customers received an order "confirmation" as soon as their payments went through; but that confirmation only meant that the order had been accepted by the system and posted on the internal assignment board for writers to consider taking. I don't think customers had any idea that the initial "confirmation" didn't mean that any writer had actually taken the order or that the order might never actually be taken by any writer before its posted deadline.
They would want to have a meeting with the writer after all and discuss certain specifics that may not have been a part of the original order.
The vast majority of the time, writers had no communication with customers, at all: typically, we just took orders off the board and submitted them by their deadline according to all of the specifications in the order. Sometimes, there were messages about the order posted by the customer; other times, we might send a message to the customer if we had questions or if anything about the order was unclear. In any case, most orders didn't require any messages and it was never appropriate for customers to make any kind of requests or to add any specifications to any order through messages, because companies price all orders and calculate the payout offered to writers based on whatever was actually ordered (no more and no less), and writers take orders relying exclusively on whatever information is included in the original order, not based on any additional information or specifications sent subsequently through messages.
Customers sometimes tried to under-pay by adding information such as "This 4-page order is for 4 single-spaced pages" or "I really need this delivered 24 hours earlier than the deadline," or "The 10 sources requested must all be annotated," in which case, we writers would have to respond by messaging back that the TOS clearly said that projects were billed as double-spaced pages, that the writer's deadline was always whatever was actually posted on the order, and that only regular (non-annotated) bibliographies were free, because annotations require additional writing. I also learned to inform the customer in those situations that I couldn't start their projects until they responded confirming that they still wanted it, because I didn't need any headaches from clients who decided that they preferred to cancel their orders rather than paying for everything they needed, only after I'd already wasted my time doing any work on it. If those projects had rush deadlines, I also let them know that any time burned off by their delay responding would have to be added to my deadline.
The place where I worked before had a system in place that informed the student automatically when a writer was assigned, or if the order had expired without being picked up.
In my experience, even when company systems do notify customers when their projects have been taken by a writer, the problem is that, to my knowledge, nothing informs customers that their projects won't actually be in progress
unless or until a specific writer takes the project. So, when orders hang on the assignment board for days (or weeks), those customers have no idea that nobody has taken their projects, yet. All they know is that they received an order "confirmation" shortly after payment; so, they have no way of knowing that their orders might sit on the assignment board, still untaken by any writer, for days or even weeks.
These days though, the companies seem to be deleting the expired orders manually, which is why writers can see the expired orders up to a week after the deadline had passed.
In my experience, this was always the case, because there were almost always expired orders on the boards, sometimes for several weeks. We weren't supposed to take expired orders without first contacting CS; but I learned to get answers quicker by simply messaging the customers to ask whether they still wanted their projects by whatever date and time I was prepared to deliver them.