First: your history is probably fine
"Error loading conversations" is a fetch failure. The app asked the server for your chat list and did not get a usable answer. Nothing in that sequence deletes anything. Before you start recreating work, run the recovery steps — history reappearing intact is the normal outcome.
Recovery, in order
- Reload once. Transient failures are common and a plain refresh clears many of them.
- Sign out and sign back in. An expired or half-refreshed session token is the single most common cause. Signing out forces a clean token.
- Clear site data for grok.com. Cookies and local storage for that one origin, nothing else. You will be signed out; sign back in and the list is refetched from scratch.
- Try a private window. If history loads there, something in your normal profile — an extension, a stale cache — is interfering.
- Check a second device. If your conversations show up on your phone, your account and data are fine and the problem is local to the first browser.
Causes worth knowing about
- Session expiry. Long-lived tabs eventually hold a token the server no longer honours. The app does not always recover from this gracefully; a sign-out fixes it.
- Multiple accounts in one browser. If you are signed into more than one Google or X account in the same profile, the app can authenticate as the wrong one and legitimately find no conversations. Use a separate browser profile per account.
- A single very large conversation. Threads with hundreds of turns, large attachments or many generated images are slow to serialise and occasionally time out. If the failure started right after opening one specific chat, start a new chat and avoid reopening that one for now.
- Network filtering. Corporate proxies and some VPNs interfere with long-lived API requests. Retry on a different network before concluding anything.
- An xAI-side incident. If the same failure appears in a private window, in a second browser, and on another device, it is not your setup.
When to stop troubleshooting
If every check above points outward — other devices fail too, other people report the same thing — there is no local fix. Wait it out. We are an independent extension developer with no visibility into xAI’s backend; anyone claiming they can restore your Grok history is not telling you the truth.
If you use a batch tool on grok.com
Automation extensions read the same conversation list you do. If the list will not load, a queued batch has nothing to attach to and will stall or fail every item. Fix the session first, then restart the queue — a stalled queue is a symptom here, not the cause.