DeepSeek chatbot faced major outage, disrupting services for over seven hours globally.
Platform reported initial fix but performance issues continued into the following day.
Outage raises concerns as DeepSeek competes with global AI leaders rapidly evolving.
China's DeepSeek had one of the worst outages in its history when the popular AI chatbot went down for more than seven hours overnight.
A report from Bloomberg said that the outage forced DeepSeek to make several updates to fix the problem.
2 March 2026
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DeepSeek Outage Disrupts System
According to the outage tracking platform Downdetector, users first began reporting faults with the platform on the evening of March 29. The start-up’s official status page acknowledged an initial issue at 9.35 pm, eventually marking the incident as resolved about two hours later.
However, the disruption continued into the following day. Subsequent updates on March 30 indicated that DeepSeek was addressing another case of performance issues, which took until 10.33 am to be fully fixed.
Reason behind Extended Downtime
The exact causes of the massive outage have not been revealed so far.
According to Mint, DeepSeek has maintained that it has a near 99% operational record since it first unveiled the R1 model in January 2025, making the outage an even more unusual event for the Chinese AI start-up.
What’s the DeepSeek Furore?
Deepseek had its viral moment in the month of January in 2025, when its AI models gained widespread attention and rattled Silicon Valley, triggering a sell-off in tech stocks and wiping off billions of dollars in wealth as investors began questioning assumptions around American dominance in the AI race.
However, it has been a long wait for DeepSeek fans since then. The start-up is yet to deliver another similarly high-profile model capable of rivaling the latest offerings from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. Meanwhile, contemporaries such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are evolving rapidly, even Chinese players like Alibaba have also gained ground, with its Qwen models performing strongly across various global benchmarks.
DeepSeek’s Global Footprint
Despite the outage, DeepSeek has been a major player in the global AI race.
According to Reuters, when it launched its R1 chatbot in January 2025, DeepSeek became one of the most downloaded AI apps worldwide, briefly surpassing established competitors in user adoption.
DeepSeek being a low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence model, grabbed global attention in December 2025 when it stated in a paper that training its DeepSeek-V3 model required less than $6mn in computing power using the lower-capabilitiy Nvidia H800 chips.
Its rise spurred interest in low‑cost, open‑source AI development, challenging Western expectations about China’s role in advanced AI innovation and reshaping competitive dynamics in the industry.
