Posting this mainly to document a pattern, since I’ve found several older threads describing the exact same situation with no resolution ever reported.
My case: my account’s MFA only accepts TOTP. My authenticator (1Password) somehow never generated any codes, no way to fix it locally. I have no recovery code (was never issued/saved one), haven’t enrolled in Advanced Account Security, and every recovery action (disabling MFA, adding a passkey, generating a recovery code) itself requires the same broken TOTP. So there’s no way to bootstrap a working method from inside the account. I’m still logged in on other devices, which doesn’t help either, since those sessions hit the same TOTP wall for any security change, and finally got logged out entirely after a password reset. (which still worked with my email!)
I’ve had two support cases open for days (one general, one a formal GDPR data-access request in the EU to at least retain all my data) and both have gotten only templated replies pointing back to steps I’ve already ruled out, eventually suggesting I create a new account; not once acknowledging the consequences of paying for an unusable subscription, losing chat history, and disruption of my work.
This isn’t a new problem. Similar pattern, going back years, with no resolution reported in any of these that I could find:
- “I am unable to login and need to unbind the 2FA authentication” —
community.openai.com/t/i-am-unable-to-login-and-need-to-unbind-the-2fa-authentication/225722(2023, multiple paying users locked out for a month+, one ticket marked “Resolved” with nothing changed) - “Your account is protected with multi-factor authentication…” —
community.openai.com/t/your-account-is-protected-with-multi-factor-authentication-please-login-with-username-password-to-provide-the-verification-code/682762(2024, told plainly: no device + no code = locked out, contact support) - “Lost keys in google authenticator - cannot provide 6-digit code to login in ChatGPTP (paid user)” —
community.openai.com/t/lost-keys-in-google-authenticator-cannot-provide-6-digit-code-to-login-in-chatgptp-paid-user/249634(2023, paying user, ended up creating a second account)
If anyone has actually gotten this resolved (through Support, a specific escalation path, or otherwise), I’d genuinely like to hear how. And if OpenAI staff see this: an account-recovery path that doesn’t assume the user still has their broken MFA device would help a lot of paying customers who keep hitting this exact wall.