Hangzhou-based AI startup DeepSeek restored its chatbot service on Monday morning after a 12-hour outage that affected millions of users. The disruption started Sunday evening, leading to complaints flooding Chinese social media platforms. The company published maintenance records showing fixes issued overnight.
The Hangzhou-based AI lab DeepSeek saw its namesake chatbot website and app go offline from Sunday evening, according to service maintenance records the company published online.
The company issued fixes between 1am and 9am on Monday. South China Morning Post confirmed the service was restored by 9.13am. DeepSeek noted at the time that “a fix” had been implemented and it was continuing to monitor results. By 10.33am, the records marked the outage as “resolved already”.
Chinese social media platforms were flooded with complaints from users across the country about the breakdown. Keywords reference denial-of-service and DDoS, though the company did not specify the cause in its records. Rivals including Zhipu AI, MiniMax AI, and Moonshot AI gained ground amid the disruption.
The outage affected millions and underscores reliability issues in China's competitive AI sector.
