ChatGPT users have been facing issues while using the AI chatbot for the last few days. Many have reported that they are not able to see their conversation history on the platform, a feature that lets you continue past conversations later.
Both free users and paid subscribers have faced the issue. The problem got even more serious when brief descriptions of the chat history were shared with unintended users. Open AI then had to shut down the website for a few hours on March 20.
ChatGPT Bug Makes Conversation History Unavailable
On Sunday, a number of users took to social media to share that they received an error message while trying to access chat history on ChatGPT. The message read, “History is temporarily unavailable. We’re working to restore this feature as soon as possible.” A bug also exposed brief descriptions of conversations of some users to other users.
The website went down on Monday for nearly 12 hours while Open AI worked to resolve the issue. The servers were restored later, and the company issued a statement, “Service is restored, but conversation history is still not available. We have a root cause for the loss of conversation history and are actively working to restore it now.”
However, the conversation history continued to be unavailable even on Tuesday. Open AI then shared another update and said, “We’ve fully restored ChatGPT service to all users. We’re continuing to work to restore past conversation history to users.”
ChatGPT Users React to the Outage
The bug and the resulting outage of the website have sparked reactions from social media users. “ChatGPT being down in 2023 is like the Wi-Fi being down in 2013,” wrote a user. Another tweeted, “Are we ever gonna get our Chat GPT history back I’m running a project out of mine.”
What a bad move from @OpenAI – Being a PRO account with active payment but can’t access my history currently? A lot of work and dialog from #chatGPT is missing actually – someone else affected? pic.twitter.com/c3Ij4Our5O
— Tom Freudenberg (@TomFreudenberg) March 22, 2023
“Why am I paying for ChatGPT Plus if it is not going to work? They say that chat history is down temporarily and now I am stuck because I can’t find my old conversations to continue debugging my code,” tweeted a frustrated user.
Another wrote, “I’ve cancelled ChatGPT Plus and requested a refund. In the less-than-a-week since I signed up, the quota I got for conversations cratered, and they completely broke the history function with no explanation or communication. It feels like bait and switch.”
ChatGPT 4 was Launched Recently
The issue arose just a few days after a new model language for the chatbot, ChatGPT 4, was made available to the public. The new version provides significant updates over the existing 3.5 version as it allows inputs in images and videos and can handle over 25,000 words instead of the 3,000-word limit.
ChatGPT 4 has been available to paid subscribers only as of now. The ChatGPT Plus subscription comes at the price of $20 per month. Meanwhile, free users can continue to use the older version of the chatbot. Open AI, the company behind the chatbot, has also recently partnered with Microsoft by getting an investment of $10 billion from the tech giant.
For more news and updates, keep watching this space.