BEIJING, March 30 – DeepSeek, the widely-used Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot, experienced its most significant service disruption Monday since achieving widespread popularity with its R1 and V3 models in early 2025.
According to the company’s status page, users were unable to access the chatbot for 7 hours and 13 minutes, beginning in the early morning hours and continuing until service was restored at 10:33 a.m. Beijing time (0233 GMT). The incident was classified as a “major outage” on the platform.
Following standard company practice, DeepSeek did not provide an explanation for what caused the extended downtime. Technical disruptions like this can result from various problems, including server failures or software glitches following system updates.
Company records indicate that DeepSeek’s developer-focused API service experienced similar day-long interruptions in late January 2025 during the peak of its viral popularity surge. However, the main website used by regular consumers to interact with the chatbot had not previously experienced such an extended disruption lasting more than two hours, according to the startup’s tracking data.
The artificial intelligence sector worldwide continues to anticipate DeepSeek’s upcoming advanced model release, though the company has not announced any specific launch dates.
