On July 30, ChatGPT’s conversation history feature experienced a significant outage, leaving many users unable to access their saved chats. The disruption caused frustration among users who rely on the feature to continue ongoing conversations or reference past inquiries.
One Reddit user described the issue: “I’ve closed ChatGPT for a minute and opened it again, only to find three months of data is gone! Images I’ve created during this period are still in the library, but chats are just…Poofed!” Another user noted the loss of important conversations stored in the chat history.
OpenAI Responds and Begins Recovery
OpenAI acknowledged the problem shortly after noon Eastern Time and worked quickly to resolve it. By 3:24 p.m., the company had deployed a fix and was monitoring recovery efforts, according to their status tracker. The outage was also reflected in user reports on Downdetector, which showed a spike in issues beginning around 10:30 a.m. ET.
The conversation history feature is central to ChatGPT’s usability, allowing users to maintain continuity across interactions. Chats are automatically titled by the system based on the content, such as “Identifying trees” or “Calculating tips,” which helps users keep track of different discussion threads.
It remains unclear whether the problem was caused by a design flaw or actual deletion of conversation data. Reports indicate that some users experienced the issue only on desktop platforms, while others encountered it on both desktop and mobile devices.
Reliability of ChatGPT and Next Steps
ChatGPT generally maintains high reliability, with OpenAI reporting 99.55% uptime across its 23 services and 99.81% uptime specifically for conversation history. This outage was an uncommon disruption for both the chatbot and its history feature. As of now, OpenAI has not made an official public announcement on social media but has promised to release a detailed Root Cause Analysis within five business days.
By July 31, OpenAI confirmed that all affected services have fully recovered. Their status page states, “All impacted services have now fully recovered,” and adds that the detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) will be published within the next five business days.
What The Author Thinks
For a platform that millions rely on daily, maintaining transparency during outages is essential. Prompt communication and detailed post-mortems help build confidence that issues are taken seriously and addressed thoroughly. As AI tools become integral to education, work, and daily life, ensuring users feel secure about their data and service stability will be paramount for continued adoption.
Featured image credit: Solen Feyissa via Unsplash
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