Banned for no reason, terrible support

ChatGPT Support
1

There was a mass ban last week, probably on Thursday, and most of the account were erroneously banned. My account got caught up in it, and since I’m an American currently living in Northeastern Europe (the Baltics) and I wake up earlier than most people in the West and America, and I appealed right away. I got an automatic reply saying my account was reviewed and the decision still stands: no human looked at it.

Later that day, when people in America woke up, there was a message telling everyone to sit tight and not do anything. OpenAI said they would fix everything. Everyone who did not appeal had their account restored, but if you appealed and were banned and denied, there is no system in place to override the appeal. Support told me that.

I have the email, and I’ll paste what they responded with. For anyone who appealed before and is still banned, know that your ban is still bogus, and they need to fix it. No one is taking responsibility, and everyone is passing the buck, and there is no clear way to get to the right person to deal with it.

"If you received an email stating that the appeal decision is final, we’re unable to override or manually re-review that decision from our end. We also can’t manually reset the account or process another appeal after a final decision has been sent.

“We understand this is frustrating, especially if your appeal was reviewed before a broader fix was in place. We’re documenting feedback like yours internally to help improve this process in the future.”

They acknowledged that their system cannot handle this situation and that it is frustrating. That is comforting… but are they documenting it to help fix the problem? Including getting in touch with us later (or something else I am not aware of) to improve the process?

How do you plan to improve the process for people who get banned and cannot get their accounts back? You could restore our accounts today, not next time. You are saying you will ban our accounts next time and have a better process in place for when that happens. OpenAI needs to do a better job here, and someone from the company needs to take charge of this situation.

OpenAI, fix this.

2

Thanks for sharing the details, @Madbaron. I can see why this has been frustrating, especially if your appeal was processed before the broader fix was rolled out.

For context, the accounts affected by the mass suspension event on July 5, 2026 were reported as resolved through OpenAI's status updates. If your account is still suspended, it likely needs an individual review.

Please open a support ticket at support@openai.com, as account-specific investigation requires personal information that shouldn't be shared publicly. Once you have a case ID, feel free to post it here and we can help monitor the issue and troubleshoot where possible.

-Mark G.

3

Thanks for the response.

Case number: 09816388

4

Thanks for sharing the details, @Madbaron.

One point to clarify for others reading: your account was banned a day before the larger mass suspension event, and your case was reviewed manually by our specialized team.

At this time, once a final appeal decision has been issued, support is not able to override the account status, reverse the decision, or start a second review. I understand why that feels especially difficult when the process may have felt unfair.

On the refund request, that question has been shared with the specialized team for further investigation, and they’ll follow up on your existing email thread once there’s an update.

-Mark G.