China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot suffers longest outage since viral rise in early 2025

China’s popular DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot suffered on ​Monday its longest outage since the ‌viral rise of its flagship ​R1 and V3 ⁠models early last year.

DeepSeek’s status website showed that the chatbot suffered a “major outage” ‌lasting 7 hours and 13 minutes, from the ‌early hours of Monday morning ‌until ⁠10:33 a.m. 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 that its API ⁠service, a function mostly used by developers to integrate the chatbot ‌into custom applications, saw 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 given no indication of a ​timeline.