BEIJING  - 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.

(Reporting by ​Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Jamie Freed)