This is the second time this has happened to me. The first occurrence was around the beginning of 2026, and it happened again today.
I normally keep a large number of tabs open because that’s how I organize my work. Today, I launched another Brave window while my main window (with many open tabs) was still running. My intention was simply to work from the new window and then close the old one to keep my taskbar organized.
After closing the original Brave window and continuing to browse normally, I noticed that I had been logged out of almost every website.
The affected sites included:
YouTube
Gmail
Outlook
And essentially every other website where I was previously signed in.
However, WhatsApp Web remained logged in, which makes the issue even more confusing.
What was NOT affected
Only the cookies/session data appeared to be lost.
The following data remained intact:
Browsing history
Bookmarks
Saved passwords
Extensions
Browser settings
This does not appear to be a new profile being created, since everything else remained exactly as before.
Expected behavior
Closing one Brave window while another Brave window is open should not delete all website cookies or active login sessions.
Additional information
I did not manually clear browsing data.
“Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows” is disabled.
This is the second occurrence of the exact same issue.
The first occurrence happened several months ago (around the beginning of 2026).
I have not been able to identify a reproducible pattern other than what I described above.
If there are any logs, debug information, or files that would help identify the cause, I’d be happy to provide them. Since this has now happened twice, I wanted to report it in case this is an issue affecting other users as well.
Hi Mattches, sorry if I didn’t explain it very well before. I’ll try to explain it more clearly.
What happened is this: I usually keep a lot of tabs open in Brave instead of closing them. Sometimes I’m too lazy to close them, and other times I intentionally leave some tabs open so I can come back to them later. Eventually, I end up with so many tabs that it becomes difficult to manage them.
To deal with this, I don’t close the tabs one by one. Instead, I open a new tab in a separate window by dragging it out of the current window. Then I close the original Brave window that contains all of my old tabs.
When I do this, Brave treats the new window with that single tab as if it’s the only remaining browser window, while all the tabs in the original window are considered closed. This is my usual way of “clearing” all my tabs without having to close each one individually.
However, this time, when I started using that new separate window, the issue I described in my first post happened.
As for the first time this happened, at the beginning of 2026, I honestly don’t remember if I used the same method, so I can’t say for sure. I only know that this data loss happened to me back then as well.
I’ve been using this method for a long time: I open a new tab in a separate window and then close the Brave window that contains all my old tabs. It’s simply a much faster way to get rid of all my old tabs instead of closing them one by one.
And for the shield question: I dont have it activated
One small thing I would check before changing anything else: Settings → Privacy and security → Site and Shields Settings → Forget me when I close this site, and also brave://settings/clearBrowserData to make sure nothing is set to clear on exit. If those are off, your window workflow is useful detail for Brave staff because closing one window should not wipe normal cookies while another window stays open.
Settings → Privacy and security → Site and Shields Settings → Forget me when I close this site, and also brave://settings/clearBrowserData to make sure nothing is set to clear on exit.
I would just like to point out that bookmarking your tabs and/or using the Close all tabs to right option is probably quicker than the method you have for closing your tabs.
As for your issue, it’s hard to determine what exactly happened here. I also just did what you described (on a smaller scale) by opening two windows, tearing tabs from one and dropping them into the other, then closing the original window. I did not lose any data/cookies/sessions. Do you have any extensions installed at this time?
@Mathszy unfortunately the only thing I can suggest at this point (given the specificity of your issue) would be disabling those extensions to see if that helps. However, it sounds like this issue doesn’t occur very often so I understand not wanting to run this particular test.
Additionally, if you want to intentionally try to reproduce the error and manage to find reproducible steps, that would help us find the underlying cause.
Yes, I understand that I wasn’t able to provide many useful details. I shared everything I could remember about what happened when I lost my cookies.
I also tried to reproduce the issue, but nothing happened.
At this point, I don’t think the cookie loss was actually caused by the method I use to close all my tabs. I only described what I was doing at the time because, when I was writing the bug report, I noticed that the Brave support community values detailed information when investigating issues.
Unfortunately, that’s all I remember about what happened.
Just had the same thing happen to me about 20 min ago. Brave been working fine for months. I turned off my PC, came back to it a few hours later and suddenly I am logged out of everything, no cookies exist, no site data, nothing. Just checked the same settings and nothing to set to clear at any point. My homepage, extensions custom settings are is still set correctly. Looks like it just cleared everything else for no reason?
The last crash report was 7 days ago, so nothing there.
