DeepSeek outage leaves millions cut off and sparks complaints as rivals gain ground

DeepSeek issued fixes between 1am and 9am on Monday.

Photo: Xinhua Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek suffered a prolonged outage overnight that extended into early Monday morning, disrupting service for hundreds of millions of users, according to a company notice and user feedback.

The Hangzhou-based AI lab’s namesake chatbot website and app were offline from Sunday evening, with the company continuing to investigate while issuing fixes from between 1am and 9am on Monday, according to service maintenance records the company published online.

The service appeared to be restored by 9.13am, according to a trial use by the South China Morning Post.

At the time, DeepSeek said in its records that “a fix” had been implemented and added it was continuing to monitor the results.

Chinese social media platforms were flooded with posts from users across the country complaining about the breakdown.

DeepSeek had more than 355 million users as of February.

Photo: Xinhua “Only after DeepSeek went down did I realise I no longer knew how to work without it,” user yezi888 said on Xiaohongshu, a lifestyle platform known in the US as RedNote.

DeepSeek had more than 355 million users as of February who relied on it for various tasks ranging from drafting emails to preparing work proposals, according to Aicpb.com, an analytical service that tracks the popularity of global AI tools.

DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.

This is not the first time DeepSeek’s online service has faced large-scale interruption.

In late January last year, shortly after the then little-known lab released its R1 reasoning model and made it free globally, it was hit by denial-of-service attacks meant to overwhelm its servers and bandwidth with a flood of internet traffic.

The company described them as “large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services” at the time.

The latest outage comes amid growing anticipation and speculation over the company’s next AI model, DeepSeek V4, whose release has repeatedly slipped past expected timelines.

Local rivals including Zhipu AI, MiniMax AI and Moonshot AI have made major performance gains with their own releases to global acclaim, outshining DeepSeek, which has remained silent on the progress of its next model.

原文链接: 南华早报