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.

As per company protocol, no reason was given for ‌the outage. Such incidents can be caused by a wide range of issues, from malfunctioning servers to bugs stemming from an update to the AI chatbot.

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.