China’s widely used AI chatbot, DeepSeek, encountered its most significant outage, being offline for more than seven hours. The outage began on a Sunday evening, as reported by users on Downdetector, with DeepSeek’s status page acknowledging the issue around 9:35 pm. Although marked as resolved after two hours, the problems persisted until 10:33 am the next day.
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, has maintained an operational record of nearly 99% since introducing the R1 model in January 2025. Initially gaining popularity in January 2025, DeepSeek’s AI models caused a market downturn in Silicon Valley, sparking concerns about American AI dominance. Despite this, DeepSeek’s models are not as advanced as those from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Anthropic, a US-based AI firm, has accused three Chinese unicorns, including DeepSeek, of unlawfully using its Claude model to enhance their systems. Allegedly, these Chinese companies created fraudulent accounts to train their models using millions of exchanges with Claude, raising national security concerns. Anthropic warned that such models lacking proper safeguards could be exploited for cyberattacks and other malicious purposes.
