October 19, 2026 • Reliability Desk • 3 min read

"Selected Model Is at Capacity." Then the Refund Bot Said No.

On Monday a paying ChatGPT user reported a capacity error loop across every model while OpenAI logged a file download incident, and an EU subscriber said the support bot refused a refund.

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

Monday morning, October 19, brought a fresh run of complaints from people who pay OpenAI every month. One could not get ChatGPT to finish a single tool call. Another could not get a refund. Several more said their Codex allowance was gone before the work was.

"Over 20 times in a single session"

At 6:46 AM Pacific a paid user filed a bug report on the OpenAI Community forum titled "Selected model is at capacity error loop across all models when executing tools." Using the ChatGPT desktop app on Windows 11, the user wrote that whenever ChatGPT tries to run tools, search the web or run commands, "it immediately fails and falls into an unrecoverable infinite loop" showing "Selected model is at capacity. Please try a different model." The report says this happened "over 20 times in a single session" and across all available models, so switching models, the fix the message itself suggests, did not help.

The timing matters. OpenAI's own status page logged an incident called "File Download errors" at 6:31 AM Pacific the same morning, saying users were "experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services." It was marked resolved at 7:14 AM with the note that "all impacted services have now fully recovered." Whether the capacity loop and the file download incident share a cause, OpenAI has not said; the forum report had no staff reply when we read it.

The refund the bot would not give

On r/codex, a subscriber whose $200 Pro plan had just renewed wrote that, as an EU resident, they understood they had a right to a pro rata refund if they asked within 14 days. OpenAI's site, the user wrote, says to make that request through the support chatbot. The chatbot's answer, as quoted in the post: "Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, we're unable to issue a refund for this subscription."

The day before, another r/codex user had asked whether European subscribers should use their consumer protection laws together, writing that after weeks of never hitting a limit on Sol 6.1 High they had hit it "every day" for three days, and calling it "NOT NORMAL."

One hour, 12 percent of a quota

The usage reports kept coming. On r/OpenAI a user wrote that "in just one hour using 6.1 Sol Xhigh, my usage dropped from 100% to 88%." On r/codex a new subscriber who came over from Cursor wrote that the $20 plan ran out of its five hour limit before a single feature was done, that upgrading to the $100 plan used half the weekly allowance "in a few hours," and that after the reset only 28 percent was left. Another wrote that they used "100% of my 5h limit in less than an hour with Sol 6.1 Medium."

100 emails and one case number

On the OpenAI Community forum, a user wrote that they had been contacting OpenAI Support "for almost one month" and had sent "over 100 emails," listing image generation that repeatedly fails, memory that does not work as expected and inconsistent answers. "New cases keep getting closed as duplicates," the post says, "and I am repeatedly redirected to the existing case."

What OpenAI has said

The OpenAI status page read Monday morning showed all systems operational after the File Download incident closed, and listed nothing about usage limits. None of the posts above had a reply from OpenAI staff when we read them. These are individual user reports; we have not measured any account's usage or seen OpenAI's refund records.

We will update this page if OpenAI responds.

Sources

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