Sol Max Stopped Following Instructions. Conversations Would Not Load.
On Saturday, a Plus subscriber posted five questions about GPT 6.1 Sol Max reliability and usage, and another said every ChatGPT tab crashed after an hour. OpenAI listed no incident.
A home office desk, shown for illustration. Photo: Free-Photos via Pixabay, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
On Saturday, October 17, paying ChatGPT subscribers filed two separate complaints on the OpenAI Community forum within four hours of each other: one about GPT 6.1 Sol Max getting less reliable, and one about conversations that will not load at all. The OpenAI status page showed no incident for either.
A Plus subscriber: reliability, not just limits
At 12:54 PM Pacific, a ChatGPT Plus subscriber posted a thread titled "GPT 6.1 Sol Max, Severe Reliability Regression and Accelerated Usage Consumption (October 16 to 17, 2026)." The post says that over the past 48 hours the model has shown a "failure to follow straightforward, explicit instructions," and that it has been "overlooking information and evidence already available in the conversation or retrieved through tools." It also describes the model "contradicting earlier findings without identifying or explaining the discrepancy."
The user wrote that one task, a send ready draft reply to support correspondence, came back with unresolved placeholders, which set off another round with an automated support system. The post says the central issue is reliability and not simply usage limits, and that Plus allowance seems to be consumed faster than before, even in light sessions. It asks OpenAI five direct questions, including whether routing or reasoning settings changed on October 16 and 17 and whether anyone is investigating. One reply at 1:46 PM said: "I think we’re all feeling this sentiment."
"Could not load this ChatGPT conversation"
At 4:38 PM, another user opened a thread titled "Widespread Could Not Load Conversation and 429 Multi Tab Lockout." The post says: "Is anyone else completely locked out of their workflows for the past 3 days?" It adds that after about an hour of continuous work, "every single open window and tab completely crashes with the “Could not load this ChatGPT conversation” error," that retrying does nothing, and that "opening incognito windows doesn’t bypass it."
The three replies in that thread did not confirm the problem. A moderator moved it to a different category and asked how many tabs the user runs at once. But the forum's related topics list shows the error is not new: a separate thread titled "Could not load this ChatGPT conversation" had 23 replies and 816 views and was active on October 17, and an older thread about "Unable to load GPT conversation" had 73 replies and 9,279 views as of October 14.
What OpenAI has said
On the status page we read Saturday afternoon, OpenAI said it was fully operational and not aware of any issues affecting its systems. Neither thread had a reply from OpenAI staff addressing the reported behavior. These are individual user reports on a public forum, and we have not independently reproduced either problem.
We will update this page if OpenAI acknowledges either issue.
Sources
- OpenAI Community: GPT 6.1 Sol Max, Severe Reliability Regression and Accelerated Usage Consumption (October 17, 2026)
- OpenAI Community: Widespread Could Not Load Conversation and 429 Multi Tab Lockout (October 17, 2026)
- OpenAI status page, read October 17, 2026