Beijing: China’s popular AI chatbot DeepSeek faced its longest outage since launch, staying offline for several hours overnight and affecting users across the country. The incident came as a shocking disruption for one of China’s leading AI platforms.
Users began reporting problems late on Sunday night, March 29, 2026. Many said that DeepSeek’s website and app were not working or could not be accessed. Reports of the same quickly increased on service‑tracking websites.
DeepSeek confirmed the problem on its official status page, stating that it detected a system fault at around 9:35 p.m. local time. The company first said the issue was fixed within two hours, indicating that an initial solution had been put in place. However, the issue lasted longer than expected. Updates later showed that problems continued through the night, and many users were still unable to properly access the service early Monday morning.
According to DeepSeek, a more stable fix was implemented around 9:13 a.m. on March 30, 2026. By 10:33 a.m., the company confirmed that all services were working normally and were being closely monitored to avoid further issues.
DeepSeek has not disclosed the exact reason behind the outage. Experts, however, opined that long outages like this can happen due to heavy server load, system updates, or technical problems behind the scenes, especially when AI services are growing quickly.
The length of the outage stands out because DeepSeek has maintained a strong reliability record. Since launching its main R1 model in January 2025, the platform has worked almost all the time, with about 99% uptime, making a shutdown that lasted several hours rare.
DeepSeek is often described as a major success in China’s AI ecosystem and a key domestic alternative to Western chatbots. Its rapid rise last year helped position it as a national AI leader.
The outage also comes amid growing speculation that DeepSeek may be preparing a major new model update. Although the company has not confirmed anything, industry experts believe internal system changes could be one possible reason for the disruption.
The timing of the outage is important too because Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have recently launched new or improved AI models. This has made competition in China’s AI market even more intense.
Despite the incident, DeepSeek said services are now fully restored. The company continues to monitor performance, though it has yet to release a detailed explanation.
The outage, all in all, sheds light on the growing dependence on AI tools in China and the challenges of maintaining reliability at scale. How DeepSeek handles this issue, and whether it releases a major update next, will be closely watched by both users and the wider tech industry.
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