DeepSeek Outage Affects Millions, Sparks User Complaints
- tech360.tv
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
A prolonged overnight outage at Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek disrupted service for hundreds of millions of users, sparking widespread complaints across social media platforms. The company’s chatbot website and app were offline, according to a company notice and user feedback.
The Hangzhou-based AI laboratory began investigating the disruption after its namesake chatbot went offline from Sunday evening. DeepSeek issued fixes between 1 a.m. and 9 a.m.
Service appeared restored by 9:13 a.m., according to a trial use by the South China Morning Post. DeepSeek’s records stated a "fix" had been implemented, and the company continued to monitor the results.
The service outage was marked as "resolved already" in a record updated at 10:33 a.m. Users across China flooded social media platforms with posts complaining about the breakdown.
One user, yezi888, commented on Xiaohongshu, "Only after DeepSeek went down did I realise I no longer knew how to work without it." Xiaohongshu is a lifestyle platform known as RedNote in the US.
As of Feb., DeepSeek had more than 355 million users who relied on its services for various tasks. These included drafting emails, preparing work proposals, and other functions, according to Aicpb.com, an analytical service tracking global AI tools.
The recent outage is not the first large-scale interruption for DeepSeek's online service. In late Jan. last year, the company's R1 reasoning model, released globally for free, faced "large-scale malicious attacks" that overwhelmed its servers.
This latest disruption occurs amid anticipation for the company’s next AI model, DeepSeek V4, which has repeatedly missed expected release timelines. Meanwhile, local rivals such as Zhipu AI, MiniMax AI, and Moonshot AI have gained global acclaim for their own model releases, surpassing DeepSeek.
DeepSeek's chatbot services experienced a prolonged outage affecting hundreds of millions of users.
The disruption led to widespread user complaints on Chinese social media.
The company implemented fixes, with services appearing restored by Monday morning.
Source: SCMP
