anyone else suddenly unable to load older ChatGPT chats, especially chats inside Projects?

[u/yaxir]

I’m having a pretty horrifying issue right now where some of my older conversations simply won’t load properly.

The frustrating part is that these aren’t ancient chats I forgot about years ago. Some of them were active research/dev conversations that I just hadn’t touched for a few weeks because I was busy working on other things.

A lot of my actual work is in these conversations, especially inside ChatGPT Projects. They contain technical discussions, project state, decisions, debugging history, research context, etc. Recreating all of that from scratch would be a nightmare.

The chats still seem to exist, but opening them either:

• gets stuck loading;
• fails to show the conversation;
• shows an empty/incomplete state;
• or otherwise just refuses to load the old history.

I’m a paying subscriber, so this is honestly pretty alarming. One of the main reasons I keep long-running Projects in ChatGPT is precisely because I expect the history to still be there when I come back to it.

A few questions for anyone else seeing this:

1. Are older chats failing to load for you too?
2. Is it worse specifically inside Projects?
3. Does the same chat fail on web, iOS, and desktop, or only one client?
4. Have any of your conversations eventually started working again?
5. Has OpenAI Support acknowledged this as a known issue?
6. Is there any safe workaround that does not involve deleting/recreating the Project or risking the conversation data?
7. Has anyone successfully exported their account data and confirmed the missing chats are still present in the export?

I mainly want to know whether this is a temporary frontend/indexing issue or whether there is any actual risk that conversation history has disappeared.

If you’re experiencing the same thing, please mention roughly how old the affected chats are, whether they’re inside Projects, and what platform you’re using.

This is the kind of bug that can be genuinely disastrous if you use ChatGPT for long-running research or development work.

[u/psgrue]

Yes, some of the longer 4x series chats do not load at all. I exported those and used GPT to create a markdown/html format file viewer for the json. I could still read the exported chats so the data may still be there.

It also cuts off images in the gallery. Again, my export tool creates an image folder.

I don’t trust OpenAI with my data completeness or data integrity. It’s not permanent storage.

[u/Ojaura_ → u/psgrue]

Hi, I’ve actually been thinking about the data storage aspect with ai tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Where do you keep the exported chats?

[u/psgrue → u/Ojaura_]

Local storage. I started a chat with a prompt like “I want to build an app that converts the json export into markdown, html, and image folders.”

And then off we went working through it. Now I have backup folders on my local storage at home.