Major ChatGPT Feature Goes Down in Unusual Outage

On Wednesday users were left in the dark when ChatGPT’s discussion history feature went offline.

According to a Redditor with the response “I’ve closed ChatGPT for a minute and opened it again, only to find three months of data is gone!”. “Images I’ve created during this period are still in the library, but chats are just…Poofed!”

Another Redditor also claimed that “I had some important convos saved there.”

With respect to its status tracker, OpenAI verified the problem shortly after noon ET and released a remedy by 3:24 p.m. “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” it reads. Around 10:30 a.m. ET, the outage tracker Downdetector also indicates a surge in user-reported problems.

Yesterday, OpenAI claims to have fixed the problem and will release a report detailing the events within five days. “All impacted services have now fully recovered,” the website’s status page states. “The detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) will be published in the next 5 business days.”

Information that some users might still want to view is deleted when conversation history is removed from the side menu. Even after releasing a patch, OpenAI continues to report “degraded performance.”

One essential component of the otherwise straightforward chat UI is conversation history. Because past chats are frequently around one or two main topics, users may refer to them or carry on. With its understanding of the topic, ChatGPT automatically calls each new discussion “Identifying trees” or “calculating tips.”

It’s unclear whether the talks are truly erased or whether there is a design flaw. Some users are only reporting problems on desktops, not mobile devices, while others are having problems on both.

In general, ChatGPT is a dependable product; according to OpenAI, its 23 services have an uptime of 99.55%. An outage is an uncommon occurrence for the chatbot as a whole and for this specific feature, as conversation history has a 99.81% uptime rate. The problem has not been discussed on OpenAI’s social media accounts. We’ve made contact to get additional details, and if we hear back, we’ll update this report.

This is the second outage observed this year on ChatGPT. The first was encountered in June.