China's popular DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot suffered on Monday its longest outage since ​the viral rise of its flagship R1 ‌and V3 models early last year.

DeepSeek's status website showed that the chatbot suffered a "major outage" lasting 7 ​hours and 13 minutes, from the early ​hours of Monday morning until 10:33 a.m. ⁠local time (0233 GMT), when the incident was ​marked as resolved.

DeepSeek data shows that its API ‌service, ⁠a function mostly used by developers to integrate the chatbot into custom applications, saw consecutive day-long outages in late January 2025, at the ​height of ​its viral ⁠moment.

But its webpage where ordinary users can ask the chatbot questions ​directly had not experienced a major outage ​longer ⁠than two hours until Monday, according to the startup's status website.

The global AI industry is ⁠eagerly ​awaiting the release of DeepSeek's next-generation ​model, but the company has given no indication of a ​timeline. (Reuters, 2026-03-30)