DeepSeek AI Service Disruption Affects Millions of Users During Extended Outage

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company based in Hangzhou, experienced a significant service interruption that lasted approximately twelve hours. The disruption began on Sunday evening and continued into Monday morning, affecting the company's chatbot platform across both website and mobile applications. According to maintenance documentation released by the firm, technical adjustments were implemented between 1:00 AM and 9:00 AM on Monday. Service appeared to be reinstated by 9:13 AM based on verification by the South China Morning Post. DeepSeek indicated in its records that a corrective measure had been deployed and that ongoing observation of system performance was underway. By 10:33 AM, the company officially noted the incident as resolved. The outage prompted widespread user dissatisfaction across various Chinese social media networks, with numerous complaints registered nationwide. As of February, DeepSeek reported having over 355 million users, making this disruption particularly impactful. The incident occurred amid competitive pressures in the AI sector, potentially allowing competing services to attract users during the downtime. The company continues to examine the root causes of the technical failure.