China's DeepSeek Suffers Unusual Multi-Hour Service Outage

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek experienced its longest service outage since the rapid rise of its R1 and V3 models. The disruption occurred in two separate incidents on March 29 and 30, lasting more than 8 hours in total. The exact cause of the outage has not yet been identified.

DeepSeek had maintained stable service without major issues for over a year, making this prolonged outage an unusual occurrence. While there were some disruptions to the API service during the initial R1 launch, the web chat service has since maintained a very high uptime rate over the following months.

Meanwhile, DeepSeek is preparing to launch its next-generation model, V4. V4 is a Multimodal model capable of generating text, images, and video, and is reportedly being trained with assistance from Chinese AI chip makers Huawei and Cambricon.

Competition in the Chinese AI market is currently intensifying, with rivals launching new models such as Alibaba's Qwen3.5, ByteDance's Seedance 2.0, and Zhipu's GLM-5.