China’s popular DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot has suffered its longest outage since the viral rise of its flagship R1 and V3 models.
DeepSeek’s status website showed the chatbot suffered a “major outage” lasting seven hours and 13 minutes from the early hours of Monday until 10.33am local time (0233 GMT), when the incident was marked as resolved.
As per company protocol, no reason was given for the outage.
Such incidents can be caused by a wide range of issues, from malfunctioning servers to bugs stemming from an update to the AI chatbot.
DeepSeek data shows its API service, a function mostly used by developers to integrate the chatbot into custom applications, was hit by consecutive day-long outages in late January 2025 at the height of its viral moment.
But its webpage, where ordinary users can ask the chatbot questions directly, had not experienced a major outage longer than two hours until Monday, according to the startup’s status website.
The global AI industry is eagerly awaiting the release of DeepSeek’s next-generation model, but the company has yet to indicate a timeline.