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Comment by abbadadda | Hacker News Reader

LOL I keep getting, “ Oops, an error occurred! Too many failed attempts. Try again”… my login codes are mysteriously not working when trying to delete my OpenAI/ChatGPT account.

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When I type in 'DELETE', the button just stays disabled for me. When I tried to make the request through their 'Privacy' portal, I receive a mysterious 'Session expired' error message, and now I've been locked out with the message 'Too many failed attempts'...

Did you type in your email? It seems already filled in because it shows you your email address as the placeholder text but you need to fill in.

Oops, my mistake. That worked. - Thanks.

Probably, on the backend: “Server Error 500: Users deleting OpenAI Accounts too fast. Try again later.”

Make sure you enter both DELETE and your email above.

It took me a minute to see this.

Pour one out for the dev who got called on saturday morning to break the account deletion process

Can i gat hack's

If he breaks it for a day or two half the deletions won't happen.

That said, I doubt there's very many.

The lament I think is more that this is a kind of "dark pattern" that's not really regulated. IMO it should be as easy to delete an account as it is to sign up. To my mind, this is very similar to subscribing/unsubscribing which IIRC is regulated now.

The overall point I'm making is that it is "gross" when companies do stuff like this and yet there's zero accountability. Or when it comes to reliability of account deletion tech companies put up their hands and say "whoops technology is hard."

They tried!

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...

https://www.consumerfinancemonitor.com/2025/07/23/eighth-cir...

Yeah they intentionally broke it. So on Monday morning, instead of just deleting my account, I will be terminating all of the accounts in our company and moving them all to Anthropic. Keep it up, Sam!

It claims that I can’t end my subscription because I signed up on another platform. How odd, once money is involved suddenly our AGI contender can’t implement basic features. Or I’m a fool somehow.

If you signed up via e.g. iOS then OpenAI literally is not allowed to manage your subscription. They do not have the capability to do so.

Is that other platform Apple?

Failed logging in again to delete my OpenAI/ChatGPT account with, “ An unexpected error occurred while creating your session.”

Same thing on Safari as on Firefox 45 minutes later… I’ll have to try from the laptop when I’m home.

yeah, does not work for me either. Whatever I put in the DELETE input field, the button is still inactive,

Edit: Had to "submit a request".

So glad they let me request my account and data deleted, really grateful /s

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