The Chinese AI chatbot “DeepSeek” went down for over seven hours on Monday, marking a new low point in reliability for one of the world’s most watched AI platforms.
DeepSeek’s status website confirmed a major outage lasting 7 hours and 13 minutes on Monday, starting in the early hours of the morning and resolving at 10:33 a.m. local time. The company gave no reason for the disruption, following its standard protocol of staying silent on the cause of technical incidents. Outages of this kind can stem from server failures, bugs introduced by updates, or infrastructure issues at scale.
This was a notable milestone in the wrong direction. DeepSeek’s chatbot had never experienced a major outage longer than two hours since the global rise of its R1 and V3 models in early 2025. The platform’s API service, used by developers to build custom applications on top of DeepSeek, had previously suffered consecutive day long outages in late January 2025 at the height of its global moment. But the core product that ordinary users interact with directly had held up until now.
DeepSeek shook the global AI industry when its R1 model arrived and matched the performance of much more expensive Western competitors at a fraction of the cost. That moment put Chinese AI development firmly on the map and rattled investors and labs alike. The platform has maintained significant global attention since then, with its next generation model among the most anticipated releases in AI right now. The company has not given any indication of a timeline for that launch.
A seven hour outage will not define DeepSeek, but it is a reminder that even the most disruptive AI platforms are not immune to the basic realities of running a product at global scale.
DeepSeek server down for over seven hours on Monday in its longest outage since the platform rose to global prominence in early 2025.
(Image credit: Deepseek AI)
