Major service disruption affects DeepSeek chatbot in China
The cause of the extended downtime remains unknown, with no official explanation released by the AI firm.
DeepSeek’s chatbot suffered a seven-hour-plus disruption in China, prompting multiple updates as the company worked to restore full functionality. Users began reporting issues on Sunday evening, with further performance problems recorded on Monday morning.
Initial alerts appeared on monitoring platforms and DeepSeek’s own status page, which acknowledged an incident shortly after it began. Although early fixes were deployed within hours, additional disruptions followed, requiring further corrective updates before the system stabilised.
The company has not disclosed the cause of the outage, and no official comment has been provided. The extended downtime stands out for a platform known for consistent performance, which has maintained a near 99 percent uptime record since the launch of its R1 model in 2025.
The disruption comes at a time of heightened anticipation for DeepSeek’s next major update, as speculation builds across China’s competitive AI sector, where firms continue to race to release new models.
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