Hi guys, please help me.
Context / stack
Building an IG bot. Pipeline: ManyChat (Instagram) → External Request (JSON) → n8n (self-hosted v1.105.4) → OpenAI (4o-mini, Assistants API) → Respond to Webhook (JSON) → (ManyChat) Response Mapping → Send Message {ai_response}.
Logs/records in Supabase.
Conversation memory design (how we keep context)
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We use the OpenAI Assistants API with persistent threads per Instagram subscriber.
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On the first message we create a thread and store the mapping in Supabase:
subscriber_id → thread_id. -
On the next messages we reuse the same thread (read
thread_idfrom Supabase), append the user’s text, create a run, then poll run status in n8n (Check Run Status → If Completed? → Wait 3s & Retry). -
When the run is completed, we fetch the latest assistant message, save it to Supabase, and return JSON to ManyChat via Respond to Webhook:
{ "ai_response": "..." }
Expected behavior
ManyChat sends JSON to n8n:
{ "subscriber_id": "1482029640", "text": "Hi" }
n8n generates a reply and returns:
{ "ai_response": "Hello! How can I help you today?" }
Then ManyChat sends that ai_response back to the user.
Actual behavior
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Test Request in External Request consistently fails with:
Operation timed out after 10001 ms with 0 bytes received→ Logs show “Response is null.” -
In real conversations:
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Short replies sometimes work.
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For longer ones (processing > ~10s due to thread+run polling) ManyChat shows “Response is null,” even though n8n reaches Respond to Webhook and the reply is written to Supabase.
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After this happens, the next user message is often not processed (it doesn’t appear in ManyChat logs and doesn’t reach n8n); only the second attempt triggers again.
Please, can anyone help me solve this problem? 🙏
