Runs hang indefinitely, Stop fails, and recent conversation history disappears after refresh (web and desktop) #52166

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

Desktop app version not captured. The specific documented incident occurred in the ChatGPT web interface with Work enabled, showing GPT-6.1 Sol and Medium reasoning. Similar failures are reported in Codex, ChatGPT Work, and ordinary ChatGPT, on web and desktop; this report does not establish that all surfaces share the same root cause.

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Business.

What platform is your computer?

Windows desktop; web browser and desktop applications affected. Exact Windows, browser, and desktop application build numbers were not collected.

What issue are you seeing?

Recurring conversations/runs become stuck indefinitely. The Stop button does not cancel or visibly recover the stuck task. After refreshing affected conversations, recent messages and assistant output have sometimes disappeared from the visible history. Retrying the same prompt can reproduce the hang.

Tool-call stalls have become noticeably more frequent recently. The problem is not limited to coding requests or a single client: I have experienced it in Codex, ChatGPT Work, and ordinary ChatGPT on web and desktop.

A specific incident on October 8, 2026 (America/Chicago, UTC-05:00):

• In an existing Pokémon GO PvP discussion, I submitted a simple correction: “clyderi is a PALDEAN wooper.”
• The message was timestamped 11:06 AM.
• A screenshot captured around 11:33 AM still showed “Working” and the square Stop control, with no response to the correction. The run had therefore remained unresolved for approximately 27 minutes.
• Pressing Stop did not resolve the task, according to my observation.
• In earlier incidents, refreshing caused recent conversation content to disappear, including an assistant response I was attempting to correct.

The screenshot verifies the visible pending state, prompt timestamp, model/reasoning selection, and Stop control. Failed cancellation, elapsed time, recurrence, and history disappearing after refresh are my reported observations, not conclusions from execution logs.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

There is no confirmed minimal deterministic reproduction outside the affected conversations. The observed sequence is:

1. Continue an existing conversation in one of the affected products.
2. Submit a prompt or a short factual correction.
3. The run remains on Working/Thinking or stalls around a tool call, without completing.
4. Press Stop; the task does not visibly cancel.
5. Refresh to attempt recovery; in some previous incidents, recent messages or assistant output are then missing from the displayed history.
6. Resubmit the same prompt; the hang can recur.

The documented Work prompt was a simple species correction, rather than a request for a long-running task. The exact tool involved, if any, was not identified.

What is the expected behavior?

• A simple correction should receive a response without an indefinite run.
• Stop should reliably cancel an active run, or display a clear cancellation failure and supported recovery path.
• Stalled tool calls should terminate or surface an actionable error rather than leaving the conversation indefinitely pending.
• Refresh/reopening should preserve conversation content and show its authoritative state.
• Recovery should not require repeatedly resubmitting prompts into the same failure.

Additional information

Impact: repeated interruptions, repeated work, apparent loss of recent conversation history, and no dependable way to stop the affected runs. This is making the products difficult to use reliably.

The underlying persistence state is unknown: missing visible history is not proof that the underlying messages were permanently deleted. Likewise, a pending indicator does not prove that computation continued for the entire period.

No execution logs, HAR capture, cancellation request traces, or conversation ID are included. Private conversation identifiers and full conversation content are omitted from this public report. Desktop versions and exact affected normal-ChatGPT models have not been collected.

Potentially related reports:

• macOS remote conversation stuck on Thinking #46593 — conversation stuck on Thinking; Stop did not resolve it.
• Conversation history stuck on old messages across multiple chats #43314 — conversation history displaying old messages instead of recent work.

These have overlapping symptoms, but an identical cause is not established.

Please investigate run cancellation and conversation-state persistence/reconciliation, and provide a supported recovery procedure that preserves history. If the cross-product symptoms need routing to a different team, please direct or route the report accordingly.

Evidence

Image

This image shows the stuck tool call.

Video

This video shows that clicking stop does nothing.

After Refreshing browser tab

In this image we can see the lost history after refreshing the browser tab.