China’s DeepSeek experienced its longest chatbot outage since it became popular in early 2025. The disruption lasted over seven hours on Monday and affected the service used by regular users.
The company’s status page recorded a major outage that lasted 7 hours and 13 minutes. This is a rare outage lasting several hours.
Public chatbot sees its longest disruption yet
Reuters reported that the outage started early Monday and ended at 10:33 a.m. local time (0233 GMT), when DeepSeek’s status website marked the issue as resolved. This was the longest outage for the chatbot since the “viral rise” of its R1 and V3 models early last year.
Silicon Republic also described the event as unusual. DeepSeek’s status page first noted an incident around 9:30 p.m. local time, and it took nearly two hours to resolve before the wider service disruption continued for several more hours. This shows how rare such outages are for DeepSeek’s main chatbot.
DeepSeek gives no reason for the outage
As per company protocol, DeepSeek did not provide a reason for the disruption. The news agency said outages like this can happen for many reasons, such as server problems or bugs from a recent update to the AI chatbot.
Without an explanation, users and developers only have the company’s status page timeline instead of a detailed technical report. For a startup under global attention, even a short outage can raise new questions about how reliable the platform is as more people use it.
Why this outage stands out
The API, which developers use to add the chatbot to their own apps, had back-to-back day-long outages in late January 2025, when DeepSeek was at its most popular. However, the public webpage for regular users had not had a major outage longer than two hours until Monday.
This makes Monday’s incident more important than a typical glitch. DeepSeek’s public chatbot is the company’s most visible service, so a disruption lasting over seven hours is a big deal for a platform that has grown quickly thanks to public interest.
Pressure rises as the industry waits for DeepSeek’s next move
The outage comes at a tricky time. The global AI industry is eagerly awaiting DeepSeek’s next-generation model, but the company has given no indication of a timeline for its release. This means DeepSeek faces a reliability setback just as people are watching to see what it does next.
For now, the outage seems to have been fixed on the same day.
Still, the long duration makes it stand out. In the fast-moving AI world, viral success can bring quick attention, but staying in the spotlight depends on stability and uptime as much as on how well the model works.
