Gemini chat vanished bug Feb 19: Fixing Bug & Slowness Crisis

1. Gemini chat vanished bug Feb 19 The “Source of Truth”: Navigate directly to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini. This is the raw server log. Your “vanished” prompts are safely stored here.
2. The Hard Extraction: Click “Details” on your recent activity, copy your critical prompts, and paste them into a local text file or Google Doc.
3. The App Workaround: If you are using the iOS or Android app, log out, clear your app cache, and log back in. If that fails, abandon the app temporarily and use a desktop browser, which has proven slightly more stable during this outage.

The Historical Parallel

Gemini chat vanished bug Feb 19: This mirrors the infamous ChatGPT history outage of March 2023, where an open-source library bug caused users to see other people’s chat titles. While Google’s bug is a sync failure rather than a privacy breach, the lesson remains identical: relying on a live AI chat window as a permanent filing cabinet is a recipe for disaster. Cloud interfaces are volatile; local text files are permanent.

The Backend Blunder: Why Did It Break Today?

But why did the system fracture specifically this week? The answer lies in the server rooms, not the user interface.

On Tuesday, February 17, 2026, Google officially shut down several legacy model endpoints, including the older gemini-2.5-flash-preview. The goal was to force-route traffic to the newer, heavier Gemini 3.0 and the unannounced 3.1 “Deep Think” architecture.

However, they underestimated the regional propagation delay. Millions of user apps were still pinging the “dead” 2.5 servers. When those requests were suddenly re-routed to the new 3.x clusters, the regional edge nodes bottlenecked. This massive re-indexing load is what caused the AI to stall, timeout, and ultimately sever the connection to your chat history UI to save memory.

The February 19 Outage: At a Glance

Issue	User Experience	The Technical Reality
Missing Chats	Sidebar is completely blank; months of work gone.	Sync Failure: Data exists in Google “My Activity” logs, but the UI cannot fetch it.
Severe Slowness	Prompts take 5+ minutes; 500 Server Errors.	Traffic Bottleneck: Deprecation of 2.5 models forced a traffic jam onto the new 3.x servers.
App vs. Web	Mobile apps are entirely bricked for history.	Web versions occasionally reload if you hard-refresh (Ctrl+F5).

Future Outlook: The Next 48 Hours

When will Google fix this?

Google Support has acknowledged the global issue, though they have refused to commit to a hard public timeline, simply telling users to “wait.” However, based on developer logs, Google deployed a “cascading fix” late on February 18.

Because of the sheer size of the global user base, these patches take roughly 12 to 24 hours to propagate across all global servers. Expect the multi-minute latency to resolve first (likely by the morning of February 20), as traffic routing stabilizes. The restoration of the visual chat history in the sidebar will be the final step.

Until then, treat Gemini as a volatile scratchpad. If it generates something valuable, export it to Google Docs immediately.

DO LEAVE A COMMENT ON WHAT EXACT ISSUE ARE YOU FACING, OUR TEAM WILL HELP YOU RESOLVE IT

Frequently Asked Questions

Are my Gemini chats deleted forever?

No. The bug is a display error. Your full prompt history is still safely stored on Google’s servers. You can view and recover your raw inputs by visiting your Google Account’s “My Activity” page and filtering by Gemini.

Why is Gemini 3 Pro so slow today?

Google recently shut down older model endpoints (like 2.5 Flash) to upgrade the system. This caused a massive traffic jam as all user requests were suddenly forced onto the new servers, resulting in heavy latency, timeouts, and 500 Internal Server errors.

Should I use the mobile app or the website during this bug?

Switch to the desktop website (gemini.google.com). The mobile apps (both iOS and Android) are currently struggling to synchronize the new cache data, making the web interface slightly more reliable for immediate recovery.

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