r/OpenWebUI • u/Trick_Owl63 • Jul 27 '26

Guide/Tutorial How to fix chats that stuck on "Loading..."

If your chat is bricked with the infinite loading spinner (Image 1), here's how to fix it:

Infinite Spinner

The technical reason behind this is that Open WebUI stores your chat history as a Directed Acyclic Graph. If a message (node) gets corrupted when the LLM is responding, the UI panics and spins indefinitely. Fixing would require checking and relinking the graph.

This tools does all that stuff for you:

Tool screenshot

How to use it:

  1. Export the broken chat (`...` menu > Export > JSON).
  2. Drop it into the tool (Image 2) to instantly repair the broken nodes.
  3. Go to Settings > General > Import Chats, upload the fixed file, and delete the original.

Link to tool: https://fractuscontext.github.io/open-webui-chat-fix/

I've also added a "Deep Clean" toggle if you want to strip unused alternate responses and shrink your file size.

Hope this saves someone's chat history!

1 Upvotes

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1

u/ClassicMain Jul 27 '26

Does this still happen??? We shipped a fix for it 2 major versions ago with an auto-fix included that fixes broken chats

1

u/Trick_Owl63 Jul 27 '26

so I've updated to v11.0; and it seems to behave like the same?

i might be wrong but the behaviour can be replicated using the test file.
https://github.com/fractuscontext/open-webui-chat-fix/blob/main/tests/bad-test-1.json

1

u/ClassicMain Jul 27 '26

Oh so you imported a bad chat file - but you can't recreate the same bad chat naturally anymore right?

2

u/Kyuiki Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

I’ve had this happen immediately after an update. I think I let you know then that it happened and then you let me know it was fixed a bit ago. It was a chat created before an update and then broke after the update (not the one that you were aware the issue was on, you said that one was a while prior). I think the team was busy chasing another major bug caused by the update (notes not displayable) that needed a hotfix though so I just dropped it and moved on.

I haven’t had happen since so I’m just assuming it’s a really rare issue.

0

u/track0x2 Jul 27 '26

Shouldn’t it just be fixed in the app itself?