DeepSeek chatbot hit by longest outage since rapid rise

China’s DeepSeek suffered its longest service disruption on Monday, with its widely used artificial intelligence chatbot offline for more than seven hours during its most significant outage since gaining global traction in early 2025.

Reuters reported that the Hangzhou-based company’s status page logged a “major outage” lasting 7 hours and 13 minutes, beginning in the early hours of Monday and resolving at 10:33am local time. The disruption affected both general users and developers relying on its application programming interface, though no official cause was disclosed.

The same report noted that outages of this scale are unusual for DeepSeek’s public-facing chatbot, which had not previously experienced downtime exceeding two hours. The company’s API services had encountered extended disruptions in January 2025 during peak demand, but those incidents were limited to developer integrations rather than the core user platform.

Bloomberg reported that users first began flagging problems on Sunday evening, with the company issuing multiple updates as it worked to restore functionality. DeepSeek said “a fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results,” while some users reported intermittent access returning before full resolution.

The extended outage stands out against DeepSeek’s operational record, which Bloomberg said had remained close to 99 per cent uptime since the launch of its R1 model in January 2025. The chatbot’s rapid rise positioned it as a leading Chinese competitor to US-developed AI systems, attracting global attention for its performance and cost efficiency.

The company has yet to provide any indication of what caused the disruption, though industry norms suggest possibilities ranging from server failures to software bugs introduced during updates. The absence of detail is consistent with DeepSeek’s established protocol of not commenting on technical incidents.

The outage comes as anticipation builds around the company’s next-generation model, which is expected to expand capabilities across text, image and video generation. Reuters noted that DeepSeek has not provided a timeline for its release, despite heightened competition from domestic rivals and continued scrutiny from international markets.