Hanging, and defiying instructions

What issue are you seeing?

I am reporting ongoing reliability and correctness failures affecting ChatGPT, Work Mode and Codex on 11–12 August 2026.

This is not simply a slow response or one frozen screen. I have experienced the following:

• Conversations repeatedly lose requirements, decisions and constraints that were already clearly established.

• Completed content disappears. During a Dev Week research task, ChatGPT produced a list containing four comparable projects. I opened one result and, when I returned, the research output had disappeared.
• Tasks regularly remain spinning for 30–60 minutes without producing a completed answer. One research request took approximately 45 minutes and the result subsequently disappeared.
• A Codex task ran for approximately three hours while repeating the same activity. It did not recognise that it was trapped in a loop and did not stop itself.
• The system has ignored explicit instructions after confirming that it understood them. In my Clariia CRM and newsletter work, it introduced or acted on workflows I had expressly ruled out.
These failures have affected active CRM, newsletter and website work. I have spent substantial time correcting the system, reconstructing lost context, reviewing unsafe changes and producing repeated handovers instead of completing my work.
The failures have continued since approximately 12:00pm NZST on 12 August.

It is getting to the point that upgrading to the pro account has been a waste of over $200 nz as I am redoing more that actually accomplishing anything!!!!! And even worse, I can not trust what is say if it directly ignores my directives and does what it wants!

• At one point Codex would not open in either the ChatGPT application or VS Code. 11/08/2026 5pm is NZ time

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What steps can reproduce the bug?

Ask it do do something/anything ....

What is the expected behavior?

hanging

Additional information

No response

Start with the reported symptoms and attached screenshots; the issue does not identify a source file, test, or specific entry point. Reproduction is currently only “Ask it do do something/anything,” and completion would require narrowing the failures to a repeatable case with defined expected behavior.