One click erased 90 minutes of work and my first real hope on Outlier

After months of searching for a serious opportunity on AI work platforms, I finally found a project that felt like a real path forward.

It was the Aether Multilingual Stereo Headphone Check/Live S2S screening on Outlier. I spent around 90 minutes carefully reading the instructions, completing the onboarding, passing the practice questions, and submitting the first three graded answers.

I had reached Question 4 out of 5. While preparing my answer, I accidentally pressed the Back button on the side of my mouse. The assessment page immediately disappeared. I tried to return through browser navigation and history, but the platform redirected me to the dashboard.

The screening could not be reopened.

Question 4 was never submitted. Question 5 was never answered at all.

Yet the project immediately changed to:

Project Disabled
Assessment: Ineligible

Support responded almost instantly with a general policy stating that interrupted or incomplete assessments cannot be resumed or retaken. They did not confirm whether Questions 4 and 5 were blank. They did not explain how an incomplete five-question assessment could produce a final eligibility result. They did not review whether the system had treated accidental browser navigation as a completed failure.

This is bigger than one assessment!

Platforms like Outlier ask contributors for precision, patience, expertise, and trust. But trust has to work in both directions. A screening that determines access to paid work should not be permanently destroyed by a single browser Back action without:

• a warning before leaving the page,
• autosaving the current response,
• the ability to resume an interrupted session,
• or at least a human review when the final questions were never submitted.

When a person can spend more than an hour doing everything carefully, reach the final stage, and lose the entire opportunity because of one accidental click, the system is not measuring skill anymore.

For some contributors, these projects can represent the first realistic chance to build financial independence, professional experience, or simply confidence that the AI work market has a place for them. When that chance disappears because of a preventable interface failure, it damages faith in the platform itself.

I am asking a simple question:

How can an assessment be treated as a valid failure when two of its five graded answers were never submitted?

Has anyone else experienced an Outlier or Aether screening being marked Ineligible after accidental navigation, a browser interruption, or leaving the assessment page? Were you ever given another attempt or a human review?

I have screenshots of the project status and the support response. All personal information will be removed from anything posted publicly.