DeepSeek down: AI chatbot suffers its biggest outage since viral launch

China‘s popular DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot experienced its most significant disruption on Monday, marking its longest outage since its flagship R1 and V3 models gained widespread popularity early last year.

The AI firm’s status website confirmed a “major outage” that lasted for 7 hours and 13 minutes.

The service was unavailable from the early hours of Monday morning until 10.33am local time (02.33 GMT), when the incident was officially declared resolved.

In line with company protocol, no specific reason was provided for the downtime. Such interruptions can stem from a variety of technical issues, ranging from server malfunctions to software bugs introduced during updates to the AI chatbot’s system.

While DeepSeek’s API service, primarily utilised by developers to integrate the chatbot into bespoke applications, faced consecutive day-long outages in late January 2025 during its peak viral period, the public-facing webpage for direct user interaction had not previously endured a major outage exceeding two hours, according to the startup’s own status reports.

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.

DeepSeek’s new V4 model will be “multimodal”, meaning it will be able to generate pictures, video and text, the Financial Times reported.

The Hangzhou-based startup has not shown its latest model to US chipmakers like Nvidia, according to a separate report from Reuters, instead sharing it with local suppliers like Huawei.

This breaks from standard industry practice, with new models typically shared to ensure that the software is compatible with the hardware.

The move is believed to be part of a broader strategy by the Chinese government to reduce the dominance of US chipmakers.

The arrival of DeepSeek’s R1 model in January 2025 caused shockwaves throughout the tech industry, as it marked the first time a Chinese competitor was able to rival the most advanced models from US giants.

It was also free-to-use, open-source, and developed at a fraction of the cost, leading to share prices of several technology companies to plummet.

Nvidia experienced the biggest one-day loss in market value in history, losing more than $500bn, while Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft also experienced significant drops in share price.