When an AI conversation will not load

Short answer: try a new chat, a private window and your phone. Those three tests tell you whether the problem is the service, your browser profile or that one conversation, and most fixes are a hard reload, signing out and back in, or disabling an extension.

You open a chat you were working in and it never appears. A spinner, a blank column, or an error that suggests trying again. Here is how to tell what kind of problem you have before you spend an hour on the wrong one.

Narrow it down first

1. Does a new conversation work? If yes, the service is up and the problem is that specific chat. If no, it is the service, your session or your network.
2. Does it load in a private window? If yes, the problem is local state — an extension, a cache, or a corrupted session in your normal profile.
3. Does it load on your phone? If yes, the conversation exists and is fine; your browser is the issue.

Those three questions separate almost every cause.

The common causes

The conversation is very long. A chat with hundreds of messages can take a long time to render, and on a loaded machine it can look indistinguishable from a failure. Give it thirty seconds before concluding it is broken. What that failure looks like.

An extension is interfering. Anything that modifies the chat page can break it when the site changes its markup. Disable extensions, reload, and re-enable one at a time. A well-built tool does nothing at all when it does not recognise the page — that is the behaviour to demand, because the alternative is exactly this.

Your session expired mid-use. The page shell loads, the conversation never arrives. Signing out and back in fixes it and nothing else will.

The provider is degraded. Check their status page before anything else. It costs ten seconds and it is the cause more often than people assume.

Stale cached assets. After a site deploys a new version, a cached older file can break the page. A hard reload — Cmd+Shift+R or Ctrl+Shift+R — is the fix.

If the conversation is genuinely gone

Not loading and having been deleted look identical from the outside. If it has disappeared from the list as well as failing to open, treat it as deleted and act quickly — the useful window is hours, not days. What to try.

The version of this that does not happen

A conversation you have a local copy of is readable whether or not the site loads it, whether or not your session is valid, and whether or not the provider is having a bad day. That is the argument for keeping your own archive, and it is most obvious on the day you need it.

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