NEW DELHI– China’s AI chatbot DeepSeek experienced its longest outage to date, remaining offline for more than seven hours overnight as users reported widespread disruptions.
Reports of service issues first emerged Sunday evening, according to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, while DeepSeek’s official status page acknowledged the problem at 9:35 p.m. Although the company initially marked the issue as resolved about two hours later, disruptions resurfaced and were not fully addressed until 10:33 a.m. the following day.
The cause of the outage remains unclear, with DeepSeek yet to issue an official explanation.
Despite the incident, the Chinese startup has maintained a near 99 percent uptime since launching its R1 model in January 2025, according to its status page.
DeepSeek rose rapidly to prominence earlier in 2025, when its AI models triggered a sell-off in Silicon Valley technology stocks and erased billions of dollars in market value, fueling concerns about U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence.
However, the company has not released models on the same scale as the latest offerings from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, developed by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
The outage comes amid heightened scrutiny of Chinese AI firms. U.S.-based company Anthropic recently accused three Chinese technology companies, including DeepSeek, of illegally extracting capabilities from its Claude model to enhance their own systems.
The firm alleged that the activity involved creating roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generating more than 16 million interactions with Claude as part of a technique known as distillation.
Anthropic warned that such practices could produce AI systems lacking critical safety safeguards, raising risks of misuse in cyberattacks, biological threats, and large-scale surveillance.
“These models could lead to authoritarian governments deploying frontier AI for offensive cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and mass surveillance,” the company said, adding that “the window to act is narrow.” (Source: IANS)
