DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot with 355 million users, went down twice in a single night — and stayed down for over 13 hours in what has become the longest disruption to its consumer service since it launched globally in January 2025.
What Happened
The outage began at 9:35 p.m. China Standard Time on Sunday, March 29. DeepSeek's status page flagged a problem with its web and app chat service. Engineers marked it resolved at 11:23 p.m. — but 57 minutes later, at 12:20 a.m. Monday, a second incident opened.
Fix attempts were logged at 1:24 a.m. and again at 9:13 a.m. The outage was not fully resolved until 10:33 a.m. Monday morning. DeepSeek issued no public explanation for either incident.
Damilare Odedina
Is DeepSeek Back Up?
Yes. As of 10:33 a.m. CST on Monday, March 30, DeepSeek's status page shows the service as fully resolved.
If the app or website is still not loading for you, try clearing your browser cache or switching between the web version and the mobile app.
What to Use Instead of DeepSeek Right Now
If you need an AI assistant immediately, these are your best alternatives:
- ChatGPT — the most widely available option globally
- Claude — strong at writing, reasoning, and analysis
- Alibaba's Qwen — the closest in reasoning capability to DeepSeek's core product, and also Chinese-built
What Made This Outage Different
DeepSeek's API — used by developers — experienced consecutive day-long outages in late January 2025 during its viral peak, which the company blamed on large-scale malicious attacks. But Monday's disruption hit the consumer chatbot directly, affecting ordinary users rather than developers. The 13-hour resolution window made it the longest consumer-facing outage since the service went global.
On Xiaohongshu (RedNote), users flooded the platform with complaints through the night. One user, yezi888, captured the mood: "Only after DeepSeek went down did I realise I no longer knew how to work without it."
What's Next for DeepSeek
The outage comes at an already uncertain moment for the company. DeepSeek's next model — widely referred to as DeepSeek V4 — has not arrived despite earlier speculation it was imminent. The company has given no public timeline.
Meanwhile, Chinese AI rivals including Zhipu AI, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI have released competitive models in recent months. DeepSeek has made no announcements on what comes next.
Damilare Odedina
