October 20, 2026 • Reliability Desk • 3 min read

"Our Workspace Remains Inaccessible." Three Days Later, Still No Answer.

A company says OpenAI deactivated its ChatGPT business workspace without warning on October 17, while paying users report message stream errors, a Codex 429 wall and a quota gone in one request.

Code on a laptop screen, shown for illustration. Photo: Marc Mueller via Unsplash, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Tuesday, October 20 opened with a company still locked out of its own ChatGPT workspace and a fresh set of paying users who could not get answers to load at all.

"Suddenly deactivated without prior warning"

On the OpenAI Community forum, a user posting for a company called MoeTeam wrote that on October 17 its business workspace "was suddenly deactivated without prior warning." By October 20, the post says, "nearly three days have passed" and the workspace "remains inaccessible." The company says it has relied on the workspace since September 2024 and that "losing access to nearly two years of important business data and project history has seriously disrupted our daily operations." It filed an appeal and contacted OpenAI Support right away, and the post lists a support case number.

"Error in message stream"

Another forum user wrote that ChatGPT keeps showing "Error in message stream" in both the browser and the macOS app, "happening since 20 Oct." The user reinstalled the app, restarted the computer and the router, and verified the network had no packet loss, and still gets the error "on almost all chats."

A ChatGPT Go subscriber posted the same day that the plan is "unusable." Every question returns "This response couldn't be loaded," the post says, after trying different browsers, different Wi Fi connections and clearing the cache, with the same result about 10 times across different chats.

A 429 on "does this work?"

On r/codex, a user on the 20x Pro plan wrote that they woke up to frequent "exceeded retry limit, last status: 429 Too Many Requests" errors "even on brand new tasks simply asking 'does this work?'", with plenty of quota left and nothing on the status page. Another r/codex user wrote that a single Astra request "burned through my entire five-hour usage quota in the blink of an eye, then started eating into my credits," when a review normally uses less than 30 percent of that quota.

What OpenAI has said

The OpenAI status page, read Tuesday, listed no incident for October 20; the most recent entry was the October 19 File Download errors incident, marked resolved. None of the posts above had a staff reply when we read them. These are individual user reports; we have not seen the workspace or any account's usage.

We will update this page if OpenAI responds.

Sources

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