Conversation rewound after editing a prompt — ~300+ messages disappeared but still appear in search

ChatGPT Bugs
1

Hi everyone,

I encountered a strange issue with one of my long conversations and I’m trying to see if anyone else has experienced something similar.

Chat title: “Sibling dynamic· Elias and Elena Killinger”

Summary:
After editing an earlier prompt in a long conversation, the chat suddenly rewound to that edited point and approximately 300+ later messages disappeared from the visible timeline.

However, the missing messages still appear in ChatGPT history search results, which suggests they may still exist in the system.

Sequence of events:

  1. I was using the mobile app and tried scrolling up to view older messages.

  2. The older messages would not load when scrolling up.

  3. I switched to the web browser version, where the older messages loaded normally.

  4. I returned to the mobile app and edited one of my earlier prompts in the conversation.

  5. Immediately after saving the edit, the conversation rewound to that edited message, and all messages after that point disappeared.

Current behavior:

  • The conversation now only shows the timeline up to the edited prompt.

  • About 300+ subsequent messages are missing.

Important observations:
• The missing messages still appear in ChatGPT history search results
• Clicking those results opens the same conversation but only shows the earlier (rewound) state
• Memories referencing the missing messages still exist and link to the same conversation

Because of this, it seems possible that the original conversation branch still exists but the UI is only showing the edited branch.

Steps I’ve taken:

  • Submitted a bug report

  • Requested a data export to inspect conversations.json

  • Avoided editing the chat further to prevent overwriting anything

Questions:
Has anyone encountered a similar issue where:
• editing a prompt caused the conversation to rewind, and
• missing messages still appear in history search?

If so, were you able to recover the conversation or did it eventually reappear?

Attached is an image of the search results showing one of the important missing messages.

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2840×151 5.37 KB

I plan to attach another image of the edited point where the chat rewound, but I am limited to only posting with one image.

Any insight would be appreciated. Thank you!

2

Here is the image of the edited point where the chat rewound.

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1982×441 41.4 KB

3

Hey @wthrhonda211, totally get why that feels like messages are disappearing, it’s pretty unintuitive at first.

What’s going on is when you edit an earlier prompt, ChatGPT actually creates a new conversation path from that point instead of continuing the original thread. So your later replies aren’t gone, they’re just on a different branch.

You should see a small toggle like <2/2> near the message. That lets you switch between those paths and bring back the previous responses.

If you’re not seeing that toggle at all, that’s a bit off. In that case, I’d suggest opening a ticket at help.openai.com so it can be looked into more closely.

Curious if the toggle shows up on your side?

-Mark G.

4

I’m experiencing the exact same issue.

To add a few more details:

  • The branch-switching button itself does appear, and I can go back part of the way, but at some point the button stops appearing, so I ultimately cannot rewind to the missing part of the conversation.

  • The missing section also behaves strangely: it looks as if the third branch is responding to the content of the second branch.

Also:

  • In the data export, only the final result is shown, and there is no way to inspect the deleted/missing portion.

  • Even if full restoration is no longer possible, I would at least like to export and review what kind of chat it was.

So overall, this seems to be the exact same phenomenon.

Thanks.

5

Good news!

In the data export, the conversations.json file appears to include the full conversation history, including branches.
I was able to verify the missing parts from there.

That said, if this is a reproducible bug affecting other users as well, I would really appreciate it if it could be fixed.

Thank you for building such a great feature.