Is Sora (Discontinued) Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of sora.com plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-09-28

How to check right now

Step 1 -- Load the site
Open sora.com→

The simplest check. If it loads and you can log in, the tool is up for you.

Step 2 -- Crowdsourced reports
DownDetector: Sora (Discontinued)→

User-reported outages aggregated across regions. Good signal for partial or regional outages.

Step 3 -- Live social
Search X for “Sora (Discontinued)down” →

Live tweets from other users. Fastest signal for a fresh outage -- often beats status pages by 10-20 minutes.

Step 4 -- Official status page
Find Sora (Discontinued)'s status page →

Most vendors publish a status page at status.[domain] or on Statuspage.io. Google-search to find the current URL.

Known issues we've tracked

DATED FLIP EXECUTED -- SORA 2 MODELS AND THE VIDEOS API SHUT DOWN ON 2026-09-24, NO REPLACEMENT (verified 2026-09-28, vendor-primary): OpenAI's model page for `sora-2` now reads: 'The Sora 2 models and Videos API were shut down on September 24, 2026 and are no longer available. There is no one-to-one replacement API.' The deprecations document still lists the six rows (`Videos API`, `sora-2`, `sora-2-pro`, `sora-2-2025-10-06`, `sora-2-2025-12-08`, `sora-2-pro-2025-10-06`) under the 2026-03-24 notice with shutdown date 2026-09-24 and replacement '---'; as of 9/28 that section had not yet been moved to 'Past deprecations', so the model page is the primary confirmation of execution. This closes the last live Sora surface: consumer web and apps ended 2026-04-26, the API ended 2026-09-24, six months apart exactly as announced on 2026-03-24. For developers who were still calling the Videos API, OpenAI names no successor; the on-site alternatives below (Veo 3.1 / Omni 1.1 via Vertex AI and Google Vids, Kling, Seedance, Runway) are the practical migration paths.
2026-09-24•OpenAI API docs (developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/sora-2.md -- 'shut down on September 24, 2026'; platform.openai.com/docs/deprecations.md -- rows still under the 2026-03-24 notice) -- fetched 2026-09-28 via curl with browser UA
T-0 CONFIRMED 2026-04-26: the Sora consumer experience is dead as of today. sora.com and sora.chatgpt.com both return HTTP 403, the iOS and Android apps were pulled, and OpenAI's help center confirms 'sora.com, the iOS app, and the Android app are discontinued April 26, 2026.' No 11th-hour delay or extension. The user-facing product is gone -- only the API remains, and only for existing API customers until 2026-09-24. Anyone Googling 'sora alternatives' or 'sora replacement' today should be redirected to Veo 3.1 (free via Google Vids), Kling 3.0 (free 66 credits/day), or Runway Gen-4.5 (current AA leaderboard #1 at 1247 Elo)
2026-04-26•OpenAI Help Center: Sora discontinuation, The Decoder, direct curl on sora.com/sora.chatgpt.com (HTTP 403, verified 2026-04-26)
OpenAI announced the discontinuation on 2026-03-24, gave users one month to export their videos via sora.chatgpt.com/exports/me, and held the line on the date despite pushback. The export window closed alongside the consumer shutdown today. OpenAI cited unsustainable compute costs (~$1M/day), low adoption (<500K MAU at end of life from a peak ~1M), and a strategic pivot to enterprise AI
2026-03•OpenAI Help Center, CNN, TechCrunch, Variety
Disney, which was reportedly committing $1 billion to a Sora partnership, learned of the shutdown less than an hour before the public announcement. The deal had not formally closed so no money changed hands, but the trust signal was bad for OpenAI's enterprise pitch
2026-03•Variety, WSJ
During its active period: characters sometimes changed appearance between cuts when generating multi-scene videos with storyboard mode, and generation queue times exceeded 10 minutes during peak hours for Plus subscribers
2026-03•Reddit r/OpenAI

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if Sora (Discontinued) is down

Top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives in the same category, ordered by our overall score.

A

Seedance 2.0

8.8

ByteDance's unified audio+video generator -- 15-second 4K clips with synchronized dialogue, music, and SFX, now shipping inside CapCut

A

Opus Clip

8.0

AI tool that automatically turns long videos into viral short clips for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts

B

Google Veo 3.1

7.9

Google's AI video stack -- Veo 3.1 (native 4K at 60fps with synchronized audio) plus the newer Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash, which from **2026-09-23 generates free 1080p scenes for any Google account inside Google Vids** (extend scenes, set exact clip durations, upscale, templates, SynthID watermark) after landing in Google Flow on 8/27. Also 9/23: **Google Flow Tools** -- describe a workflow and Flow builds a reusable custom tool; six creator-built tools shipped (ambient sound and foley stems, multilingual captions, social thumbnails, architectural textures, animated collages, Swiss-style motion graphics), each duplicable and remixable.

B

Runway

7.8

**Praxis-1 (announced 2026-09-30): Runway's first open-weight world action model for robots, built on the same video pretraining as its world models -- in testing with Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra, public release and weights 'in the coming months', not a video product.** **GWM Worlds 2 (research preview, 2026-09-03)**: real-time interactive worlds at 720p/24fps with 48 kHz generated audio, steered by text actions to any subject or the scene -- not in the product yet. Runway Gen-4.5 (shipped 2025-12-01) -- #1 on Artificial Analysis text-to-video leaderboard at 1,247 Elo. **GWM-1 (General World Model family) announced May 2026** for Worlds / Avatars / Robotics, built on Gen-4.5. Gen-4.5 also gained **native audio generation + native audio editing** (May 2026). Gen-4 Turbo supports native 4K. The most capable professional AI video generator available in 2026

B

Pika

7.8

Fast, fun AI video generator that's easier on your wallet than Runway

About Sora (Discontinued)

Tier D (5.0/10). OpenAI's text-to-video model -- consumer web + iOS + Android SHUT DOWN as of 2026-04-26 (sora.com + sora.chatgpt.com return 403). The API followed: Sora 2 models and the Videos API were shut down on 2026-09-24 -- the API shutdown executed on schedule, and OpenAI states there is no one-to-one replacement API. See alternatives: Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0, Seedance 2.0, Runway Gen-4.5

Read the full Sora (Discontinued)review →