DeepSeek suffers 7-hour outage, its longest service disruption since R1 and V3 models launched

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

BEIJING, March 30 (Reuters) - 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. Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Jamie Freed Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

China's DeepSeek suffers rare outage lasting several hours

The extended downtime is unusual for DeepSeek, which has kept its services up without many glitches for over a year. China's AI darling DeepSeek suffered one of its longest outages since the viral rise of its R1 and V3 models early last year. The start-up's status page noted an initial incident at around 9:30 pm local time (2:30 pm GMT+1), which took nearly two hours to resolve. Subsequently, in the early hours of Monday (30 March), a different incident was flagged, which took until 10:33 am local time (3:30 am GMT+1) to be fully resolved. The cause of the outage remains unclear and DeepSeek has not responded to queries put forth by the press. The extended downtime is unusual for DeepSeek, which has kept its services up without many glitches for over a year. In the initial days after launching R1, DeepSeek suffered a few outages, a number of which lasted a whole day. Overall though, the platform has kept its services running 100pc of the time for several months in a row. A year after taking the AI industry by storm with its large language model, DeepSeek is readying itself for a major update with V4. According to reports, the new V4 is a multimodal model with picture, video and text-generation features. V4 was reportedly trained with the help of Chinese AI chipmakers Huawei and Cambricon. Rival Chinese AI companies have launched a number of new models in recent months in anticipation of DeepSeek, whose new model could outperform ChatGPT and Claude, particularly on tasks that involve long coding prompts. V4 is expected to the company's most important product release since V3 and R1. In February, Alibaba unveiled its latest AI model, Qwen3.5. While ByteDance launched its popular Seedance 2.0, Zhipu unveiled GLM-5, MiniMax launched M2.5 and Moonshot released Kimi K2.5. Last September, DeepSeek launched V3.2-Exp, an experimental model meant to be an "intermediate step" toward its next-generation architecture. The V3.2-Exp model's performance is comparable to the previous V3.1 model, performing marginally worse on some benchmarks. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

DeepSeek goes down for seven hours in biggest outage since debut - The Economic Times

DeepSeek's chatbot in China experienced a rare seven-hour outage, disrupting users overnight. The startup deployed multiple updates to fix performance issues, with causes unclear. Normally reliable at 99% uptime, the AI firm has sparked speculation about a major update, as rivals like Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent release new AI services.DeepSeek's chatbot suffered a major outage of more than seven hours overnight in China, forcing the AI pioneer to deploy several updates to rectify the issue. Users began reporting faults on Sunday evening, according to Downdetector. The startup's own status page acknowledged an initial issue at 9:35 p.m. before marking the incident resolved two hours later. Subsequent updates on Monday showed DeepSeek addressing another case of performance issues that took until 10:33 a.m. to be fixed. The causes of the outages remain unclear and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. The extended downtime is unusual for a globally used app like DeepSeek, which has for over a year carried the mantle of China's breakthrough artificial intelligence service. It's also uncommon for DeepSeek itself, which has maintained close to a 99% operational record since it unveiled the popular R1 in January 2025, according to its status page. Speculation has swirled since the start of the year that Hangzhou-based DeepSeek is preparing to roll out a major update, after its initial splashy debut on January 20 last year. That prompted local rivals from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to ByteDance Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. to release a barrage of new AI models and services over the Lunar New Year holiday. Anticipation for DeepSeek's next big move remains high, though the publicity-shy company has kept mum on a timeline.

DeepSeek Suffers Major 7-Hour Outage, Longest Downtime Since Launch of R1 and V3 Models

China's Artificial Intelligence chatbot DeepSeek experienced 7 hours of downtime. It was the longest reported disruption since the launch of the R1 and V3 models. This disruption also raises concerns about platform reliability when user demand increases. The latest outage arrives at an important moment as the company planned to introduce its upcoming AI model, V4. The widely used Chinese AI chatbot faced its most extensive service disruption on Monday (March 30, 2026). This marked longest outage since the surge in popularity of its R1 and V3 models last year. According to the company's status page, the platform experienced a "major outage" lasting approximately 7 hours and 13 minutes. The company did not provide a reason for the disruption. Industry experts noted that outages of this scale are often caused by server failures, infrastructure, or software bugs introduced during updates. According to DeepSeek data, its API services have earlier faced stability issues. Despite these, its consumer-facing web interface remained stable. There were a few disruptions that lasted for more than two hours until this latest incident.