ChatGPT Error Lottery: Does the Jackpot Depend on Traffic?
Update: 12 October 2026
Well, there’s another interesting development in the ongoing ChatGPT Error Lottery!
After watching these problems come and go since 27 September, I’ve noticed what appears to be a recurring pattern.
When local user traffic would normally be expected to decrease, the number of ChatGPT errors I experience also seems to decrease.
And when traffic would normally be higher, the errors appear to return more frequently.
This isn’t a one-off observation. I’ve noticed the same pattern on several occasions over the past two weeks.
The usual collection includes:
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“Could not load this ChatGPT conversation”
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“Error in message stream”
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“Connection interrupted. Waiting for the complete answer”
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“Resume stream unavailable”
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HTTP 429 Too Many Requests
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ChatGPT Work and image-generation failures
I’m not claiming to have access to OpenAI’s actual traffic figures, so this is an observed correlation, not proof of the cause.
However, there’s an interesting connection with OpenAI’s published 29 September Root Cause Analysis.
That incident involved a feature rollout generating excessive internal requests, eventually exhausting shared infrastructure capacity and preventing conversations and tasks from starting, resuming or completing.
I’m wondering whether the continuing problems might also be sensitive to traffic levels, backend capacity, request throttling or regional infrastructure load.
Of course, the errors haven’t disappeared completely during quieter periods, and other users have reported severe failures at times when my own experience has been relatively better.
So perhaps we’re not all playing on the same lottery machine! 
A question for everyone experiencing these problems:
Have you noticed the errors becoming more frequent during periods when user traffic would normally be higher, and easing when demand would normally be lower?
Or are your failures occurring at roughly the same rate regardless of when you’re using ChatGPT?
It would be particularly useful to hear from people experiencing several of these errors together, rather than just one.
I’ve also passed this observation to OpenAI Support for consideration during the promised specialist technical review.
The jackpot is still rolling over. Hopefully someone eventually draws the winning number: a reliable fix! 