China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot suffers major outage

March 30, 2026 18:09 | News

China’s popular DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot has suffered its longest outage ‌since the viral rise of its flagship R1 and ‌V3 models.

DeepSeek’s status website showed the chatbot suffered a “major outage” lasting seven hours and 13 minutes from the early hours of Monday until 10.33am 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 its API service, a function mostly used by ​developers to ‌integrate the chatbot into custom applications, was hit by 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 yet to indicate a timeline.

AAP News

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