China-based DeepSeek is facing a prolonged outage of its chatbot, leaving users worldwide struggling to access services. Downdetector reported that the disruption started on Sunday evening and continued for more than seven hours.
The company had acknowledged the problem Sunday evening and had been trying out several fixes throughout Monday. However, the stability of the system remains unclear.
Users experienced connection failures and slow responses, which resulted in a report of faults from users. DeepSeek first declared the problem as solved after two hours, but subsequent updates showed that performance issues still existed.
The company announced that it had successfully implemented a solution on Monday morning and was now monitoring its performance. Some users maintained their access problems despite this issue.
DeepSeek experiences an unusual outage because it has maintained almost 99% uptime since launching its R1 model in January 2025. The disruption demonstrates risks that arise from excessive dependence on AI platforms because the company operates as a major player in China's AI industry.
The incident occurs during a period of increasing competition from Alibaba Group and ByteDance and Tencent because all three companies have introduced new AI tools during the past few months. The ongoing speculation about DeepSeek indicates that the company might be developing upcoming major updates even though it has not disclosed any specific release schedule.