Well first, that's not git, that's some other GUI giving its own interface to git. The majority of the time my co-workers have a git problem, it's because their GUI tool has done something weird without telling them exactly what it did - one of theirs has a "Sync Branch" button which he'd click on whenever the IDE highlighted it, and I have no idea what that's even supposed to do, but I think it was some sort of rebase.
Without knowing for sure what was going on and whether your friend was describing it using the right verbs, I'm thinking (0) didn't pull in the changes ("fetch" instead of "pull") so (1) didn't merge in any new commits, but (4) did advance master, causing it to diverge from what was on the server. Then (6) probably decided to be helpful and did a force-push instead of a regular push so it wouldn't fail on the user. That would cause the server to have your friend's changes, but be missing anything that had been pushed to master after they started working on their branch.
Without knowing for sure what was going on and whether your friend was describing it using the right verbs, I'm thinking (0) didn't pull in the changes ("fetch" instead of "pull") so (1) didn't merge in any new commits, but (4) did advance master, causing it to diverge from what was on the server. Then (6) probably decided to be helpful and did a force-push instead of a regular push so it wouldn't fail on the user. That would cause the server to have your friend's changes, but be missing anything that had been pushed to master after they started working on their branch.