China’s popular DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot suffered its longest outage on Monday since the rapid rise of its flagship R1 and V3 models early last year.

Seven-Hour Disruption

DeepSeek’s status website reported a “major outage” that lasted 7 hours and 13 minutes from the early hours of Monday until 10:33 a.m. local time (0233 GMT), when the issue was marked as resolved.

No Official Explanation

In line with company protocol, no reason was provided for the disruption.

Such outages can stem from a range of issues, including server malfunctions or bugs linked to system updates.

Past Outages Mostly Limited

Data shows that DeepSeek’s API service primarily used by developers to integrate the chatbot into applications experienced consecutive day-long outages in late January 2025 during its peak popularity.

However, its main chatbot interface for general users had not previously faced a major outage exceeding two hours.

Industry Awaits Next Model

The global AI industry is closely watching for DeepSeek’s next-generation model.

So far, the company has not indicated any timeline for its release.

(with inputs from Reuters)