Beijing: The DeepSeek chatbot has suffered a major outage that lasted more than seven hours, marking the longest disruption since the platform’s rapid rise in popularity. According to the company’s status page, the outage began in the early hours of Monday and was resolved later in the morning.
The incident has impacted both the chatbot interface used by general users and the application programming interface, commonly used by developers to integrate DeepSeek into their own systems. The platform has not provided an official explanation for the disruption, in line with its standard communication approach.
Such outages can occur due to a range of technical issues, including server failures or software bugs following updates. While short disruptions are not uncommon in large-scale digital platforms, the duration of this outage has drawn attention within the technology sector.
Data from DeepSeek has shown that its API services experienced repeated outages in early 2025 during a period of rapid user growth. However, the chatbot interface itself had not previously experienced a disruption of this length, with earlier outages typically lasting less than two hours.
The outage has come at a time when global interest in artificial intelligence platforms continues to grow. DeepSeek has emerged as a key player in the AI space, particularly following the release of its R1 and V3 models, which gained widespread attention.
Industry observers have been closely watching the company’s next developments, with expectations building around a potential next-generation model. While no timeline has been confirmed, the latest disruption may raise questions about infrastructure readiness as demand for AI services continues to expand.
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