China's DeepSeek suffers 7-hour outage, longest since launch

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.

In January 2025, Cybernews reported about “large-scale malicious attacks” that forced DeepSeek to limit app registrations.

At the time, the API service suffered a major outage for roughly two hours, and the Web Chat Service (its AI model) was down worldwide for around 16 hours.

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