Hi @OpenAI_Support, this seems to be a repeat of a previous bug [“Background mode requests stuck in ‘queued’ forever - Responses API”] which seems to crop up from time to time (just browse the “background-mode” tag).
For the last few days, my API calls using the Responses API and background mode have been failing intermittently with no rhyme or reason. I haven’t changed anything in my API setup. This is with GPT 5.6 sol and luna. The OpenAI dashboard shows “No output items.” The status of the call will be stuck in “in_progress” for 30+ minutes when the call takes 2-3 minutes max using the OpenAI Playground/Chat with the same exact prompt and reasoning effort.
Please take a look at this urgently as my app’s users are complaining and there’s literally nothing I can do about this other than hope it gets fixed (as it did previously). Thank you!
Edit/Update:
Some additional information:- The issue only happens with the 5.6 family of models, I can’t replicate this using 5.2, 5.4, or o3.
Again, this only happens with background mode, normal synchronous GPT 5.6 calls are not affected.
There is definitely something specific with the combination of:
background mode
GPT 5.6 luna/sol (haven’t tested terra)
higher reasoning efforts (medium+ on Sol, max effort on luna)
To recap, an API call that normally takes 2-3 minutes is taking 30-60 minutes to exit the “in_progress” state.
Hi, thank you for your response @VeitB! When you say 100 background requests, what are the nature of these requests? For context, the luna max calls are ~6k input tokens and ~15-25k output tokens while the sol medium calls are around the same input tokens but ~2k output tokens. Maybe if the requests are really small, you won’t encounter the issue? And are you polling the requests over time?
I’m running with a pretty barebones setup and nothing has changed in the last few days. This has been working nearly perfectly (with the occasional rare random OpenAI error) for over a year.
