"Could not load this ChatGPT conversation"

ChatGPT Bugs
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21

Hi everyone,

I’m also heavily affected by the “Could not load this ChatGPT conversation” error and wanted to add a detailed report so the team has as much information as possible.

Environment

  • Platforms: ChatGPT Web (Chrome / Edge / Brave), official macOS desktop app, and iOS app
  • Plan: ChatGPT Pro
  • Affected scope: Almost all existing conversations (both regular chats and those inside Projects). New chats can usually be started, but opening any previous conversation frequently fails.
  • Frequency: Happening daily since late September 2026. Sometimes it affects nearly every chat; other times it hits roughly every second or third conversation. The problem is intermittent but very persistent.

What happens

  1. The conversation list in the sidebar loads normally and shows all my previous chats.
  2. When I click any existing conversation, the page shows exactly:
    “Could not load this ChatGPT conversation”
  3. Clicking “Try again” sometimes works after many attempts (sometimes 20–50+ clicks or hard refreshes), but the conversation often becomes unloadable again shortly afterward.
  4. Related errors I also see:
    • “Connection interrupted. Waiting for the complete answer”
    • “ChatGPT stream recovery polling timed out”
    • “Error in message stream”
    • Network tab frequently shows HTTP 429 Too Many Requests even when I’m not sending many requests.

Interestingly, the same conversation that fails on the web version sometimes loads fine on the iOS app (or vice versa). Archived chats seem even more problematic.

What I’ve already tried

  • Hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R)
  • Signing out and back in
  • Incognito / private window with all extensions disabled
  • Different browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Safari)
  • Official desktop app
  • Waiting several hours / overnight and trying again

None of these permanently solve the issue. The error keeps coming back.

Impact

This is seriously disrupting my workflow. I have important ongoing projects and long conversations that I can no longer reliably access. Having to spam “Try again” or refresh dozens of times just to open a single chat is extremely frustrating, especially for a paid subscription.

Additional observations

  • The problem does not seem limited to ChatGPT Work or Cloud runs — it happens on normal chats as well.
  • Long conversations appear more likely to fail, but short ones are also affected.
  • Data itself does not seem deleted (I can still see the titles and, when it eventually loads, the full history is there). The issue appears to be with loading / retrieving the conversation from the server.

I’ve seen many similar reports across multiple threads since around September 24–28, 2026, so this is clearly a widespread backend or frontend reliability problem rather than an isolated account issue.

Could the OpenAI team please look into this urgently? A proper fix or at least a clearer status update would be greatly appreciated. Happy to provide conversation URLs, timestamps (with timezone), browser version, or a HAR file privately via support if needed.

Thanks in advance for any updates.

22

Hi everyone,

Thanks for flagging this and sharing the additional details. We’re investigating the conversation-loading issue further and will post an update once we have more information.

~ Ziad

23

I experienced a similar issue on October 16, 2026, around 17:23 CEST (UTC+2), using ChatGPT Plus on Chrome (Windows).

While organizing my ChatGPT conversations, I opened at least 35 existing conversations from the Recents section in the sidebar. Afterward, multiple conversations started displaying “Could not load this ChatGPT conversation”, and several other ChatGPT features also stopped working.

After waiting for some time, everything returned to normal without any intervention.

Could loading a large number of conversations in succession trigger temporary rate limiting, request throttling, or another issue affecting the web interface?

I couldn’t verify the underlying cause, but I’m sharing the sequence of events in case it helps reproduce and investigate the problem.

24

Dear OpenAI Support Team,

I am writing to formally report a critical and ongoing issue with ChatGPT that has severely disrupted my professional work over the past two weeks.

Since the beginning of October 2026, I have been regularly encountering the following error when attempting to open conversations, including newly created chats:

“Failed to load this ChatGPT conversation.”

Button: “Retry”

The issue occurs particularly when I run several ChatGPT conversations in parallel. Once the error appears, the affected conversations become temporarily inaccessible. Sometimes I have to wait 10 minutes before they become available again; in other cases, the disruption lasts an hour or longer.

This is no longer an occasional technical issue. It has become a persistent, systemic problem that makes ChatGPT practically unusable for my professional workflows.

Furthermore, since approximately August 2026, I have observed a dramatic deterioration in both the performance and analytical quality of the available models.

Previously, I could execute complex analytical prompts simultaneously across 5–10 conversations and receive results within approximately 5–15 minutes. Today, the same prompts and workflows frequently fail due to conversation loading errors and other service disruptions.

As a result, tasks that previously took me 5–15 minutes now take 2–3 days to complete using ChatGPT.

This represents an unacceptable degradation of a paid service.

The situation also raises serious concerns about whether OpenAI has introduced undisclosed resource limitations, concurrency restrictions, or other capacity-management mechanisms that negatively affect paying subscribers.

Reports from other users suggest that similar problems are affecting customers on significantly more expensive subscription plans, including plans costing $100 and $500.

What makes this situation particularly frustrating is that an OpenAI representative has acknowledged in a community discussion that the issue is being investigated. However, users have not received a clear explanation, a resolution timeline, or even actionable recommendations for mitigating the problem.

For customers who depend on ChatGPT for professional analytical work, this lack of transparency and practical support is deeply disappointing.

I request that OpenAI provide specific answers to the following questions:

  1. Is OpenAI officially aware of the recurring “Failed to load this ChatGPT conversation” error, particularly when multiple conversations are running simultaneously?

  2. What is the root cause of these failures, and is the problem related to infrastructure capacity, server-side resource allocation, or newly introduced concurrency limits?

  3. Have any restrictions on parallel conversations, computational resources, or model usage been introduced or tightened since August 2026?

  4. What immediate workarounds can affected users apply to restore reliable access to their conversations?

  5. What is the expected timeline for a permanent resolution?

  6. How does OpenAI intend to address the significant loss of service availability and productivity experienced by paying customers?

@OpenAI_Support I expect this issue to be escalated to the appropriate technical team and investigated as a serious service reliability incident rather than treated as an isolated browser or connectivity problem.

The current service reliability is unacceptable for a paid product used in professional environments.

Please provide a substantive technical response, practical mitigation recommendations, and a clear update on the investigation and resolution timeline.