New Delhi, March 30 (IANS). China’s popular AI chatbot DeepSeek fell victim to the biggest outage in its history, with the platform down for more than 7 hours overnight.
According to DownDetector, a platform that tracks outages, users started reporting the problem on Sunday evening. Reports said that DeepSeek’s status page first acknowledged the problem at 9:35 pm.
The platform reported the problem as fixed after about two hours, but after some time the problems started again and the problem could not be completely resolved till 10:33 am the next morning.
The reason for this major outage is not yet clear, because no official statement has been issued by DeepSeek in this regard.
According to the report, DeepSeek’s operation record has been around 99 percent since launching its R1 model in January 2025.
This Chinese AI startup suddenly became very popular in January 2025, when its models caused the shares of Silicon Valley tech companies to fall and billions of dollars of wealth were lost. After this, it was feared that America’s hold in the AI race might weaken.
However, DeepSeek has not yet been able to offer models of the same scale as larger platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Cloud.
Meanwhile, American AI company Anthropic recently accused three Chinese companies, including DeepSeek, of illegally using the capabilities of its cloud model.
According to the company, a technique called ‘distillation’ was used in this alleged theft, in which about 24,000 fake accounts were created and data was collected through more than 16 million interactions.
Anthropic has warned that AI models created in this way may have weak security measures and could be used for dangerous purposes like cyber attacks, biological weapons and surveillance.
The company also said that such models can be used by ‘authoritarian governments’ for cyber operations, spreading misinformation and large-scale surveillance, so immediate action is necessary.
–IANS
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