Error messages

A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

ChatGPT shows this under a reply that stopped, or where the reply should be:

A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

Newer screenshots, from September 2026, often stop after "try again." Either way it's the same error, and people report it on the web and in the apps. The frustrating part (judging by forum titles like "CRUSH everytime") is that it says "check your connection" to people whose connection is working.

What OpenAI says it means

OpenAI's troubleshooting page for ChatGPT errors groups it with "An error occurred while connecting to the websocket." and says: "These errors suggest that your device is unable to establish a reliable connection to our servers." Their word is reliable, and a reply that takes minutes to stream needs the connection to hold the whole time.

The page's fixes, as of October 1, 2026:

• Disable VPNs or proxy connections.
• Turn off Web Protect or other security filters.
• Try a different browser, or an incognito window.
• Switch to a different network or device.

On a company network, OpenAI's network recommendations article lists the domains IT needs to allow. They include *.chatgpt.com, *.oaistatic.com, *.oaiusercontent.com, *.openai.com and challenges.cloudflare.com. If ChatGPT works at home and fails at the office, a filter blocking one of these is a likely suspect.

Long reasoning replies end this way

A pattern runs through the forum reports: the error lands on hard, slow requests. In February 2025 someone on satellite internet said o1 threw it "everytime the reasoning/task becomes more complex". In September 2026 a Plus user running GPT-5.6 Sol on High posted the sequence from their browser's network log. The reply stream stopped, ChatGPT tried to resume it, the resume came back HTTP 404 {"detail":"Resume stream unavailable"}, the page fell back to polling, and "eventually surfaced: 'A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again.'"

So on long tasks, the message can mean ChatGPT couldn't pick the reply back up, with your Wi-Fi playing no part. Another user found it arriving after a full reply had already printed, with the chat then switching to "There was an error generating a response". Breaking a big task into smaller requests, or starting a new chat, gives the stream less time to fail.

When everyone gets it at once

It's also what many people see during an outage. On June 10, 2025 OpenAI's status page had elevated error rates across ChatGPT, the API and Sora, and this line showed up in the forum's incident thread until the services recovered the next day. In late September 2026, after the web redesign, people listed it alongside 429 "Too many requests" errors, and on September 29 OpenAI Support said engineering had cut down on repeated requests to "help lower rate-limit pressure".

Check status.openai.com first. If there's no incident and it follows you across browsers, devices and networks, OpenAI's help page asks for a HAR file (a recording of the browser's network traffic) and console errors with timestamps when you contact Support.