Fifty Four Percent To Zero. Codex Allowances Vanished Friday.
Plus and Pro subscribers posted the same thing on Friday: weekly Codex and Work allowance gone in minutes, one log showing 63 points in seven seconds. OpenAI listed no incident.
A sand clock, shown for illustration. Photo: Gianluca Miscione, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
On Friday, October 16, paying ChatGPT subscribers posted the same complaint in three different places: their Codex and Work usage allowance was gone in minutes, on tasks that used to run for an hour. OpenAI's status page showed no incident for it. Nobody posting had an explanation from the company.
Fifty four percent to zero in 47 minutes
On r/codex, a user wrote that the remaining weekly Codex allowance "went from around 54% to zero today, October 16." The post says the user was on GPT 6.1 Sol at normal speed in the desktop app on macOS and checked the local logs afterward: "At 17:32 UTC, they showed 55% remaining. The next reading at 18:19 UTC showed 0%, with the exact same weekly reset time." The user wrote that there was still no account specific explanation for what consumed it.
A Plus subscriber: 30 seconds and out
On the OpenAI Community forum, a ChatGPT Plus subscriber using Astra in Codex filed a bug report titled "Sudden and Abnormal Codex Usage Limit Exhaustion on ChatGPT Plus (Astra)." Before this, the report says, "I could execute complex development tasks lasting an hour or more without immediately exhausting my usage limit." Now "even a simple development task running for approximately 30 seconds immediately triggers an “Out of Codex usage limit” notification." The user wrote: "If usage limits have changed, I would expect clear communication explaining the adjustment."
Pro accounts too
The same thread picked up Pro subscribers on Friday afternoon. One wrote: "Kicked off a new Work session with browser use. Limit exhausted within minutes. Used a reset and limits exhausted again within minutes." Another posted a log line: "weekly allowance change from 37% used at 2026-10-16T18:09:16.373Z to 100% used at 18:09:22.971Z." That is 63 points of a weekly allowance in under seven seconds. That user added: "I have never had to reach out to OpenAI support before… so uh, fingers crossed?"
On r/ChatGPTPro, a Plus user asked: "I’ve a plus account and used Astra for 30 minutes and the weekly limits are almost gone in a day. Is this a scam?"
What OpenAI has said
Nothing, as of Friday afternoon Pacific. The OpenAI status page lists no incident for October 16. Its most recent ChatGPT incident was Thursday's login and signup degradation, marked resolved. The usage drops posted Friday all describe accounts that were signed in and working, then suddenly were not.
We will update this page if OpenAI explains the drops or restores the lost allowance.
Sources
- r/codex: Codex usage suddenly dropped from 54% to 0% on GPT 6.1 Sol at normal speed (October 16, 2026)
- OpenAI Community: Sudden and Abnormal Codex Usage Limit Exhaustion on ChatGPT Plus (Astra), with replies of October 16, 2026
- r/ChatGPTPro: Weekly limit almost gone in a day for Plus subscription (October 16, 2026)
- OpenAI status page, read October 16, 2026