Something went wrong. If this issue persists...

[oblique ledge]

Bug Report:

I am getting, "Something went wrong. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com." in Chrome and Chrome incognito. I have cleared all cookies. In incognito there is no history to clear. I've been having this issue for 24 hours.

In my developer console I'm seeing that the POST to https://chat.openai.com/backend-api/conversation
is returning 403 Forbidden. This is happening in Chrome in a normal window and in incognito with no extensions allowed.

In Epic Privacy Browser the POST to https://chat.openai.com/backend-api/conversation is working just fine. Presumably until 24 hours ago it was working just fine in Chrome as well.

I'm also seeing this other error which may, or may not, be germane, "Assertion failed: Input argument is not an HTMLInputElement" this is happening in onloadwrr.js line 71 "getFormProfile".

I am also seeing several errors in Epic Privacy Browser trying to pull JavaScript files from cdn.oaistatic.com. An example error is, "Refused to prefetch content from 'https://cdn.oaistatic.com/_next/static/chunks/pages/g/[gizmoId]-5b05b7cf0814d2f8.js' because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "default-src 'self'". Note that 'prefetch-src' was not explicitly set, so 'default-src' is used as a fallback." This may be a privacy browser-specific issue.

Another interesting side-effect is that I cannot just change from 3.5 to 4 while this is happening. If I do attempt to change, refreshing the page changes to the selected version of ChatGPT.

Steps to reproduce:

Any prompt to ChatGPT in either 3.5 or 4 modes.

Expected result:

ChatGPT responds to my prompt.

Actual result:

"Something went wrong. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com."

Additional information

Browser: Chrome 119.0.6045.160 (Official Build) (64-bit)
OS: Windows 10 Pro, patch 22H2

[elfin nimbus]

Hi, would you be willing to try in a new install of Firefox? Some users report issues similar to yours in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.

[oblique ledge]

What would using Firefox add? I've already reported that it works in Epic Privacy Browser, so yes it's Chrome-specific.

Also, this is the payload that is failing in Chrome:
{
"action":"next",
"messages":[{
"id":"aaa2[[redacted]]81e4",
"author":{"role":"user"},
"content":{"content_type":"text","parts":["test"]},
"metadata":{}
}],
"parent_message_id":"aaa1[[redacted]]691b",
"model":"gpt-4",
"timezone_offset_min":420,
"suggestions":["I'm going to cook for my date who claims to be a picky eater. Can you recommend me a dish that's easy to cook?","Show me a code snippet of a website's sticky header in CSS and JavaScript.","Design a database schema for an online merch store.","Give me 3 ideas about how to plan good New Years resolutions. Give me some that are personal, family, and professionally-oriented."],
"history_and_training_disabled":false, "arkose_token":"20[[redacted]]02|r=us-west-2|meta=3|metabgclr=transparent|metaiconclr=%23757575|guitextcolor=%23000000|pk=3553[[redacted]]8147|at=40|sup=1|rid=32|ag=101|cdn_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftcr9i.chat.openai.com%2Fcdn%2Ffc|lurl=https%3A%2F%2Faudio-us-west-2.arkoselabs.com|surl=https%3A%2F%2Ftcr9i.chat.openai.com|smurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftcr9i.chat.openai.com%2Fcdn%2Ffc%2Fassets%2Fstyle-manager",
"conversation_mode":{"kind":"primary_assistant"},
"force_paragen":false,
"force_rate_limit":false
}

Note that this payload looks quite different in the browser that is working. For one thing the "arkose_token" in Epic is null.

[oblique ledge]

I tried it in Firefox and it works. In Firefox I do have an arkose_token as well. The payload has several things in Firefox that are not there in Chrome.

[elfin nimbus]

Oh I apologize, I misread "Epic Privacy Browser" as a Chrome extension, not as a browser itself!! Sorry for the confusion, my bad. Thanks for reporting the Chromium bug to keep up visibility! You're definitely not the only user with the issue.

[oblique ledge]

I didn't do a new install or anything, I have all the browsers on this computer.

I'm happy to paste the different payloads from the various browsers, but I don't know what GUIDs in the payload are important (which might represent "me" to openid). I redacted anything from the Chrome payload that might have been either my GUID or a security token.

Another interesting note is that it works in Chrome on a different computer, so it's something specific to this one machine. But it travels to incognito mode.

Just for completeness, I've restarted chrome, deleted cookies, logged out and in several times as well, no change.

The only thing I haven't tried yet is rebooting Windows itself.

[elfin nimbus]

Do you happen to have a VPN installed on the affected computer?

[oblique ledge]

Genius! Yes, I have NordVPN on this computer as well as Citrix. Nord was not redirecting traffic, however it was running. Killing the NordVPN process made ChatGPT start working again!

I wonder what Chrome and Nord are doing in the background that just having Nord running caused a problem?

And, screwy enough launching Nord did not cause the problem to recur.

I restarted Nord, set up the tunnel. ChatGPT continued to work. I killed the tunnel, it still continues to work. So, it's not a straightforward conflict.

Note that Citrix has been running this whole time (but it is redirecting very specific traffic where Nord is much lower-level). Citrix wasn't very happy with me bringing the VPN up and down.

[elfin nimbus]

Aha! Yes, VPNs have been another common culprit for these kinds of connection issues. Note that it is sometimes specifically related to NordVPN's "Web Protection" feature, which, on desktop, you can find in the bottom-left in the "safety score" section. Sometimes this needs to be disabled separately from the VPN itself, so you might try that too if it happens again.

[oblique ledge]

I do have that feature enabled. Maybe it actively changed settings in Chrome and didn't "unset" them when the tunnel was dropped. I don't remember when I used the VPN last, but I'll keep track from now on. Thanks @elfin nimbus!

Here's the funny thing, I can't remember what question I was trying to ask when this all went south!

[elfin nimbus]

You are very welcome, thanks for reporting back about what worked for you! I hope that question comes back to you--pesky bugs!!!

[oblique ledge]

If we could only get rid of the computers, that would solve all our problems...

Thinking about this a little more, the easy way for NordVPN to implement that Web Protection feature would be to setup an http proxy (on top of the VPN). That would be done in the system network configuration. However, if the problem was system-wide then the other browsers would also have been effected. So, this could be a bug in Chrome that it didn't release the system-wide proxy configuration when Nord turned it off (browsers have to submit URL requests very differently when an http proxy is defined). Then when I killed Nord, maybe it sent out a signal that caused Chrome to release the proxy. I'm totally guessing and since it's fixed now I can't look into whether that's true. If it happens to me again I should be able to dig into that possibility.