ChatGPT’s ‘Clear Your Cookies’ Problem Is a UX Bug, Not User Error
ChatGPT never loads because they are having problems with sessions and caching.
By. Jacob
Edited: 2025-12-29 15:34
ChatGPT suffers from long-standing issues in its login and session-handling implementation. The most visible symptom is that the graphical user interface occasionally fails to load previous chats entirely, while users will also be unable to start new chats. This is regardless of how many times the page is refreshed. In some web applications, forcing a hard reload via developer tools or pressing CTRL + R can invalidate cached assets and recover the session, but this approach is ineffective with ChatGPT.
Note. This article is intended to highlight a recurring source of user frustration with ChatGPT that appears to affect real-world usage patterns, not edge cases or misconfiguration. The issue has been observed during regular use in Firefox, but may also occur in other browsers.
Problem: ChatGPT is not loading conversations
I have rarely encountered a problem of this severity elsewhere. The fact that clearing browser data reliably resolves the issue strongly suggests that the failure is rooted in client-side state management rather than server availability. However, this “solution” is clearly impractical: clearing cookies and cache destroys the active session and forces users to log in again—not only to ChatGPT, but to every other service where the user is logged in.
Based on the symptoms alone, the exact cause is difficult to identify. It may involve corrupted client-side state, mismatched session tokens, or flawed cache invalidation in the frontend application. Regardless of the underlying mechanism, this is not user error. Robust frontend architectures are explicitly designed to tolerate stale or inconsistent local state without rendering the application unusable.
Requiring users to clear cookies and login to use a service is not a viable workaround and should never be presented as one. If your customer support is telling users to clear cookies, then you have a technical issue that needs to be fixed.
The fact that this issue has persisted for years—despite widespread reports such as this Reddit thread, or this OpenAi support thread—points to insufficient regression testing and poor handling of client-side state across releases.
If a website only functions after users manually purge cookies or cache, that is not “normal behavior”; it is a defect. Modern browsers are built to handle large amounts of cached data and long-lived sessions reliably. A correctly implemented authentication and session flow must never depend on users manually deleting stored data, regardless of browser age or usage patterns.
Being forced to log in again is a significant usability regression. In environments where re-authentication is unavoidable—such as online banking—substantial effort is invested to ensure the process is predictable and minimally disruptive. When other websites instruct users to clear cookies, it is almost always an admission of unresolved bugs, not an acceptable long-term solution. ChatGPT should not be an exception.
AI systems are no longer just experimental tools; they have already become embedded in everyday workflows. Basic usability and reliability is no longer optional but a core requirement. A polished user experience and the resolution of outstanding bugs is essential to maintaining the contract with users. When access is unreliable or degraded by avoidable UX failures, the cost is not merely frustration but real disruption to work that now depends on these tools functioning predictably — and if ChatGPT is not working, users will simply assume server instability and go elsewhere.
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