Rare Outage Takes Down Major ChatGPT Feature – PCMag
Conversation history disappears from the side menu, deleting information that some users might still want to access. OpenAI has issued a fix, but still reports 'degraded performance.'
UPDATE 7/31: OpenAI says it resolved the issue and will publish a report on what happened in five days. “All impacted services have now fully recovered,” its status page says. “The detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) will be published in the next 5 business days.”
Original Story 7/30:
ChatGPT’s conversation history feature went down today, leaving users in the dark.
“I’ve closed ChatGPT for a minute and opened it again, only to find three months of data is gone!” says one Redditor. “Images I’ve created during this period are still in the library, but chats are just…Poofed!”
“I had some important convos saved there,” writes another.
OpenAI confirmed the issue just after noon ET and deployed a fix by 3:24 p.m., according to its status tracker. “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” it says. Outage tracker Downdetector also shows a spike in user-reported issues around 10:30 a.m. ET.
Conversation history is a core feature within the otherwise simple chat interface. Users may reference previous chats or continue them because they are often about one or two core topics. ChatGPT automatically names every new chat with its interpretation of the topic, such as “Identifying trees” or “calculating tips.”
It’s unclear if the issue is a design bug or if the conversations are actually deleted. Some people are reporting issues only on desktop, not mobile, and others are experiencing the problem on both.
ChatGPT is generally a reliable product; OpenAI self-reports 99.55% uptime across its 23 services. Conversation history has 99.81% uptime, so an outage is an unusual event for the chatbot overall and for this particular feature. OpenAI has not posted about the issue on its social media. We’ve reached out for more information and will update this story if we hear back.
Disclosure: PCMag parent company Ziff Davis owns Downdetector.
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