DeepSeek goes down for seven hours in biggest outage since debut
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The outage in China is a first for DeepSeek, which has maintained close to 99 per cent operational record since debut.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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 the evening of March 29, according to Downdetector. The startup’s own status page acknowledged an initial issue at 9.35pm before marking the incident resolved two hours later.
Subsequent updates on March 30 showed DeepSeek addressing another case of performance issues that took until 10.33am to be fixed.
The causes of the outages remain unclear, and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment.
The extended downtime is unusual for a globally used app like DeepSeek, which has, for more than a year, carried the mantle of China’s breakthrough artificial intelligence service.
It is also uncommon for DeepSeek itself, which has maintained close to a 99 per cent operational record since it unveiled the popular R1 in January 2025, according to its status page.
Speculation has swirled since the start of 2026 that Hangzhou-based DeepSeek is preparing to roll out a major update, after its initial splashy debut on Jan 20, 2025.
That prompted local rivals, from Alibaba Group Holding to ByteDance and Tencent Holdings, to release a barrage of new AI models and services over the Chinese New Year holiday.
Anticipation for DeepSeek’s next big move remains high, though the publicity-shy company has kept mum on a timeline. BLOOMBERG
