Business workspace rollback caused catastrophic data loss

ChatGPT Support
1

Hi OpenAI Team and Community Mods,

I am writing to request urgent engineering intervention regarding a catastrophic data loss event linked to Case ID: 12706586.

The Issue

My account was recently upgraded to a Business/Team workspace. Upon discovering the tier did not meet the promised deliverables, a rollback to my original individual ChatGPT Plus account was requested and executed.

Instead of a standard subscription downgrade, the platform triggered a total, hard-coded purge of my entire account history. My primary workspace, multi-month project trees, and complete historical chat logs have been completely destroyed.

Technical Assessment

This appears to be a severe architectural flaw in OpenAI’s automated migration and state handling pipelines:

  • Faulty Cascading Deletes: The downgrade pipeline is executing a total DELETE on user data objects rather than re-associating the user’s owner_id or workspace_id records back to a standalone consumer schema.
  • Lack of State Preservation: The system failed to create a snapshot or fallback state prior to executing a destructive database modification.
  • Retention/Compliance Concern: If OpenAI maintains data backups for standard system redundancy, these logs must still exist in cold storage or transaction logs. Permanently deleting paid consumer data without explicit, itemised warnings prior to execution raises serious consumer protection and data portability compliance issues.

Required Action from OpenAI Staff

Because standard frontline support handles these tickets via automated triage loops, this requires a Tier 3 Database Administrator or Platform Engineer to:

  1. Locate the snapshots or server-side transaction logs for my user ID prior to the downgrade execution.
  2. Manually restore or export the JSON/text tree of my historical workspaces.

Standard support channels have stalled on this ticket. I need an OpenAI staff member to escalate Case ID: 12706586 internally to the engineering team before the server retention window for my deleted states expires entirely.

Thank you for your immediate assistance.

2

Further to this, I now cannot access the ChatGPT app on Mac as it just flashes constantly. This has really been a horrendous experience. Just wondering if anyone else has had the same happen to them when cancelling a Team upgrade.