The DS-160 times out your session even if you're actively working on your application, if you don't save for a while

[vipulnaik]

The DS-160 times out your session if you spend a lot of time within the application (reading or writing responses) without saving. This can cause a lot of lost work, particularly when typing long answers.

To their credit, they do warn about this on their home page:

» Save your application frequently. The system will time out after 20 minutes of inactivity, and you will lose all unsaved information.

However, there's no warning offered when the 20 minutes are close to being up, so the user isn't directly reminded of the fact that they should save their changes to prevent an inactivity timeout.

EDIT: In the comments, @jaapaurelio notes that the timing out often happens just 2 minutes after a save or navigate action, so that the "20 minutes of inactivity" may be inaccurate. That suggests that not only is the advertised behavior bad design, but the actual behavior is even worse.

EDIT 2: On 2024-07-12, @vipulnaik verified getting a session timeout when I navigated after about 16 minutes of inactivity, after about 15 minutes of sporadic use. So it does seem like the 20 minutes of inactivity is an overestimate. Not sure what the exact reasons for timing out are. It could be that it's 20 minutes since the last explicit save, versus the last save-or-navigation.

Start time of the problem

The problem has likely been present for a long time, and most likely was present around September 2023. it was confirmed to be present by @vipulnaik in March 2024.

It may be possible to get a better estimate of the start time by looking at the history of the page https://ceac.state.gov/GenNIV/Default.aspx in the Wayback Machine. It's pretty difficult in practice since the Wayback Machine loads older versions of this page very slowly.

Last seen date

As of 2024-10-16, the instruction about 20 minutes was still present on the home page.

On 2024-07-12, @vipulnaik verified getting a session timeout (see EDIT 2 above) after 16 minutes of inactivity.

On 2024-10-13, @vipulnaik noticed a session inactivity time-out when trying to save after making an edit after one minute of loading the site up. However, on the second attempt, the save went through.

See also the comments for reports by other users encountering these timeouts at well under 20 minutes.

[jaapaurelio]

The timeout is much less than 20min. Sometimes I get it after a couple of minutes.

[vipulnaik]

Interesting @jaapaurelio! Is that a couple of minutes after your last edit, or after you last clicked on a save or navigation button? It may be that in-form editing doesn't count as "activity" for their purpose.

[jaapaurelio]

Couple of minutes after clicking save or navigating to the next page.

[vipulnaik]

Thanks -- updated the issue description to reflect this!

[kkalwaysok]

It is timing out in a min sometimes, when I tried to enter travel history it timed out on me like 5 times. I tried different browsers and it is still the same.

Sometimes it is timing out right after you retrieve the application.

Thanks, KK

[kiran777q]

Time out is in a min , I have experienced it all the days(almost 10 days) i worked on my application. Tried on multiple browsers ( firefox, edge, chrom ) , its the same issue on all the browser. I wish some body fixes it, so annoying.

Thanks

[kiran777q]

One more issue is, its not allowing to paste the details in the form. For example in the section where you need to enter the job duties, we need to enter lot of text and since its not allowing to paste the details and it expires in a min, need type each line and save it, comeback and type again.

[aireenmei]

It timed out less than 5 minutes while I'm actively working on the application.