DeepSeek suffered its biggest outage since launch — down for seven hours
The DeepSeek chatbot suffered a major outage in China that lasted for over seven hours overnight, forcing the company to release several updates to address the issue.
The DeepSeek chatbot suffered a major outage in China that lasted for over seven hours overnight, forcing the company to release several updates to address the issue.
According to Downdetector data, users began reporting problems on Sunday evening, writes Bloomberg.
The startup's own status monitoring page confirmed the issue at 9:35 p.m. and marked the incident as fixed two hours later. However, further updates on Monday showed that DeepSeek had to address another performance hit, which was not fully resolved until 10:33 a.m.
The reasons for the outages are unknown. The long outage is unusual for DeepSeek, which has been a breakthrough AI service in China for over a year. It is also unusual for DeepSeek itself: according to its status page, the company has maintained an availability level of about 99% since the launch of the popular R1 model in January 2025.
Rumors have been circulating since the start of the year that DeepSeek is preparing a major update after its big-ticket debut on Jan. 20 last year. That has prompted local rivals from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to ByteDance Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. to release a slew of new AI models and services during the Lunar New Year celebrations. Expectations for DeepSeek’s next big move remain high, though the typically publicity-averse company has so far remained tight-lipped about specific timelines.
Recall that this month, the anonymous appearance of a powerful AI model, Hunter Alpha, on the OpenRouter developer platform sparked speculation that DeepSeek may be secretly testing its next-generation system before an official release .
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