China’s widely used DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot experienced its longest outage on Monday since the surge in popularity of its flagship R1 and V3 models early last year. The disruption raised concerns among users and developers who rely on the platform for daily tasks and integrations.

According to DeepSeek’s official status page, the chatbot encountered a “major outage” that lasted approximately 7 hours and 13 minutes. The issue began in the early hours of Monday morning and continued until 10:33 a.m. local time, when the company marked the incident as resolved. During this period, users were unable to access services or experienced significant disruptions in functionality. In keeping with company policy, DeepSeek did not provide a specific explanation for the outage. Such technical failures can occur for several reasons, including server malfunctions, unexpected spikes in traffic, or software bugs introduced through recent updates or maintenance changes.

Company data shows that DeepSeek’s API service, which is mainly used by developers to integrate the chatbot into their own applications, had previously faced consecutive day-long outages in late January 2025, during the peak of its viral growth. However, the main user-facing platform had not experienced a disruption exceeding two hours until this latest incident. The outage comes at a time when the global artificial intelligence community is closely watching DeepSeek’s next steps. Many are eagerly awaiting the release of its next-generation model, although the company has yet to announce any official timeline or details regarding the upgrade.