Chat failing to initiate
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Tinker Pixels
Both group chat and IM failing to initiate. I mostly experience it in Firestorm Social Island (simhost-0be97bd680c67540a.agni), as do the rest of the team.
Starting an IM with someone else will work most of the time and every once in a while end up with a popup stating "Unable to start a new chat session with Username. The session initialization is timed out".
Group chats will either fail silently or give the following message inline:
"Second Life: You are the only participant in this IM session. Your message is not being broadcast at this ti2me."
Tested on Second Life Release 26.1.1.23806384790, Alchemy Beta 7.1.9.2516 and Firestorm 7.2.3.80036.
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Maestro Linden
Merged in a post:
"Failed to initalize IM" blah blah error still occurring
Ikaros Alpha
Someone tried to IM me. Before I could attempt to answer, I received the "failing to initialize IM" blah blah.
This happens several times a day, still.
You always tell us to first look if a bug was already reported. And I know this was, many times. But now I read on the status page: "Please report any unexpected issues with IM's in our feedback portal". So be it then.
crystlemarie93 Resident
This has not improved at all and between the chat failures and the seemingly associated TP crashes, it's very obnoxious. Just had another failure at 10:12 pm on August 9, 2026.
snow Scarmon
I just pay for my annual Premium Plus subscription, and I have a great idea. How about we all get a partial refund for this long term issue. LL has already dropped in-world voice mod that was one of the reasons I why I pay for my annual Premium Plus subscription now this
snow Scarmon
This same thing happened to me today Wed 7/29. From 1:00 pm when I logged in to attend a function until 3:00 pm when I gave up and left. Is there anything that I can do in-world to stop this.
mancaveevent Resident
Today morning (July, 27th 3am slt) I had the "unable to start a new chat..." in every single IM people sent me
oop Resident
If the timing is important, I had this error 1:42pmSLT July 25th.
Maestro Linden
Hi guys, we put out a backend server update yesterday afternoon (July 21, 16:00 SLT) which will hopefully fix this bug or at least reduce the rate of it occurring. We are curious to know if it's behaving better for you with this change.
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden Just to make sure I understand, this is not a sim node software update, but an update to Indra (messaging servers), and thus grid-wide?
Maestro Linden
Tinker Pixels: Yes, that's correct. It was an update to the central servers rather than the simulators, so the update was independent of any simulator restarts.
OMGWTF Barbecue
Maestro Linden This is continuing to happen to me on a regular basis in IMs with other residents as of July 23 at 7:45pm SLT. Was just afk for a bit and returned to probably 4-5 errors of failed messages.
Poe Davonius
Maestro Linden It is still going on :S
Maestro Linden
OMGWTF Barbecue Poe Davonius thanks for letting us know. Having the timestamp in particular is helpful.
Poe Davonius were the most recent cases for you also around July 23 at 7:45pm SLT, or did you see them at different times?
crystlemarie93 Resident
Maestro Linden Still happening about as regularly as before as of July 29 at almost 12:30 SLT.
Maestro Linden
Thanks for those details.
OMGWTF Barbecue
Maestro Linden Still happening regularly, see attached screenshot.
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OMGWTF Barbecue
Just happened again at 3:43pm SLT. As someone who deals with a ton of customer and designer IMs on a daily basis, this is really causing me a lot of problems and I don't understand why we're dealing with this even months later.
crystlemarie93 Resident
This is still happening on the regular.
Lettie Linden
Merged in a post:
Unable to message friends.
Tempest Belmonte
Unable to start a new chat session with xxx. The session initialization is timed out.
Carla Heartsong
This problem is getting even worse over time, it's been this way for quite a while, and now group chats get unusable.
More info: you can have this timeout or very laggy response time for small groups, while big groups can be fine, and it's usually the same groups having these issues. As if groups are distributed over several AWS servers, and one or some are failing.
But indeed, same issue with IMs
This is definitely an URGENT issue, as this touches the core of Second Life. It already has been reported in November 2025 in another feedback.
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