DeepSeek outage leaves China's popular AI chatbot down for hours
What's the story
DeepSeek, a leading Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company, has suffered its biggest outage since the launch of its R1 model in January 2025. The company's chatbot service went down for over seven hours on Sunday night. The disruption affected users across China who reported difficulties accessing the service. According to Downdetector's health tracking platform, issues first appeared on March 29, while DeepSeek's status page said it detected a fault at around 9:35pm local time.
Resolution attempt
DeepSeek initial 2 hour fix extended
DeepSeek acknowledged the first issue on its status page, confirming a fault was detected at around 9:35pm. The company initially reported that the problem had been resolved within two hours. However, further updates revealed performance issues persisted until a fix was implemented the next morning. By March 30 at around 9:13am DeepSeek said a fix had been implemented and it was monitoring results.
Update rumors
DeepSeek outage fuels upgrade speculation
The extended downtime is unusual for DeepSeek, which has maintained a nearly 99% operational record since the launch of its popular R1 model in January 2025. The outage comes amid speculation that the company may be gearing up to roll out a new-generation AI model. Despite no confirmation from DeepSeek on any timeline, rivals like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., ByteDance Ltd., and Tencent Holdings Ltd. have already launched new AI models and services over the Lunar New Year holiday.