ChatGPT's video generation outpaces Midjourney—But can it survive the outages?

ChatGPT recently experienced a power outage, affecting thousands of users globally on Monday, April 28, as reported by Downdetector which monitors service disruptions. The AI chatbot, developed by OpenAI, left users unable to access its human-like conversation capabilities and text generation features.

While ChatGPT's Sora currently leads in capabilities, its future success in video generation may depend on OpenAI's ability to resolve these persistent outages. Meanwhile, Midjourney's upcoming video model remains promising but unproven in the evolving AI video generation market that continues to grow despite technical challenges.

Problems began shortly before 3 p.m. and quickly escalated to thousands of reports by 4:30 p.m. Most issues centered around ChatGPT functionality, with a notable concentration of outage reports coming from Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland. According to Yahoo's coverage, users worldwide including those in Italy and Morocco, have been affected while trying to use the platform for tasks.

Sora integration pushes ChatGPT ahead of competitors

As of late April 2025, ChatGPT’s decision to integrate with the Sora text-to-video model has established itself as a leader in AI-driven video generation, enabling users to create video clips directly from text prompts within the ChatGPT interface. This advancement has positioned it ahead of competitor Midjourney, which despite its strong image generation capabilities hasn't yet launched a native text-to-video model, according to industry analysis.

However, reliability concerns have emerged following a significant outage on March 31, 2025, which TechRadar reported as the third consecutive day of service disruptions for ChatGPT. CEO Sam Altman described the load as "biblical" with over a million new users joining in a single hour, putting immense strain on the system infrastructure.

OpenAI acknowledges ongoing technical issues

OpenAI's status page showed they were "experiencing issues" with their services, particularly noting that "new users may experience temporary delays in video generation capabilities." The company has promised to "continue monitoring capacity closely" while thanking users for their patience during this ongoing situation that has lasted for approximately one month, according to OpenAI's status reporting. The system status dashboard reveals varying uptime percentages across different OpenAI services from January through April 2025, with APIs maintaining 99.90% availability, ChatGPT at a lower 99.49%, Sora at 99.98%, Playground at 99.97%, and Labs at 99.92%.

Multiple service disruptions reported in April

On Tuesday, April 29, OpenAI reported multiple incidents including "increased error rates" at 8:15 a.m., which they claim has been resolved, as well as "increased error rates for Deep Research in ChatGPT" at 5:01 a.m. The OpenAI status page documents showed several recent disruptions, including another issue on Monday, April 28 labeled "Increased Error Rates in ChatGPT" that was reported at 8:33 p.m. but has since been marked as resolved. OpenAI's transparency in documenting these issues demonstrates their awareness of the problems, though the frequency of these incidents raises questions about system stability. Saturday, April 26 also saw "elevated errors on APIs" beginning at 11:54 a.m., though OpenAI indicates all impacted services have fully recovered from this particular disruption.