China’s AI sensation DeepSeek faced a major disruption from late March 29 into the morning of March 30, 2026, marking the longest outage since the chatbot became widely popular in early 2025. According to the company’s status page, the service was unavailable for 7 hours and 13 minutes, with full functionality restored at 10:33 a.m. local time.
The outage affected both the web and app versions, leaving millions of users unable to access DeepSeek for tasks such as research, writing, coding, and general AI assistance. Many users reported error messages like “server busy” or connection failures. On Chinese social media, frustration spread quickly, with the hashtag “DeepSeek崩了” (“DeepSeek has crashed”) trending as users vented about losing progress on projects and daily work.
Despite constant updates on its status page, the company did not provide a reason for the downtime. Experts suggest that technical issues such as software bugs, server overload, or update failures could be responsible, though no official explanation has been offered.
Before this outage, DeepSeek’s web interface rarely experienced interruptions longer than two hours, while its API service occasionally faced multi-hour outages during peak usage in January 2025. This extended downtime highlights how dependent users have become on the chatbot’s capabilities, with disruptions affecting students, professionals, and content creators alike.
The incident comes amid growing anticipation for DeepSeek’s next-generation AI model, though no release date has been announced
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