Error messages

Something went wrong while generating the response. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

Something went wrong while generating the response. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

This is the red banner ChatGPT puts where an answer should be, with a retry button:

Something went wrong while generating the response. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.

It's one of the most-read errors on OpenAI's community forum. The biggest thread about it, from June 2024, has over 18,000 views, and it kept turning up through 2025. The newest forum post we found with this exact sentence is from December 7, 2025. In 2026 threads people are pasting a shorter line, "Something went wrong. Please try again", so if that's what you're seeing, the advice below is the same.

What it means

ChatGPT received your message and failed to produce an answer. That's all the sentence tells you. OpenAI's troubleshooting page (as of September 25, 2026) calls the general "Something went wrong." message "a general error that may indicate a temporary server issue or a problem with your local setup." It doesn't break the causes down further.

Looking back through the threads, the cause has landed on either side.

When it's OpenAI's side

Big waves of it line up with incidents. On June 12, 2024 a forum moderator wrote that "OpenAI has acknowledged the chatGPT issue and their team is actively working on resolving it" and closed the thread. In April 2025 o1 pro users got it on every message for days; one posted a Support email acknowledging an o1 pro issue and suggesting other models in the meantime. A December 2025 report had Projects failing for three weeks on one Plus account while ordinary chats worked, until Support passed it to the technical team and it came back on December 22.

If status.openai.com shows an incident, waiting is the fix.

When it's your account or browser

The September 2024 thread shows the other kind. Many people found the website failing while the iPhone or Android app worked. One person had it on one account of two. Another got a single answer after signing out and back in, then the error again.

OpenAI's help page lists these steps for the general error:

• Refresh the page or start a new chat.
• Clear your browser cache and cookies, or use a private window.
• Disable browser extensions, especially privacy and security tools.
• Turn off VPNs or secure DNS tools like Web Protect, and try another network.

VPNs cut both ways here. Support told one user in July 2024 that VPNs "may interfere with the performance of our platform". That same user had just found the error stopped when he switched a US VPN on, so it's worth trying the setting you don't normally use (VPN off if it's on, and the other way round).

Getting help

The forum isn't where this gets fixed. A moderator said in 2024 that it "is not being actively monitored for issues by OpenAI staff" and pointed people to the help center; another said in 2025 to use the support chat icon at the bottom right of help.openai.com. For a problem only you have, send the time it happened, the model and the chat link. OpenAI's page also asks for a HAR file (a recording of the browser's network traffic) if it follows you across browsers and devices.

For the related streaming failure where a reply cuts off halfway, see "Error in message stream".