China’s frontier AI model DeepSeek suffered a 12 hour power outage on Sunday night that continued till Monday morning, leaving millions of users affected, before the company services were restored.
According to South China Morning Post (SCMP), the DeepSeek AI chatbot for website and app, went offline on Sunday evening, with several users reporting the outage on social media. Sunday night’s power outage occurs ahead of the launch of its highly anticipated model DeepSeek V4.
The DeepSeek AI startup, which owns the AI model by the same name, has started an investigation into the issue. By 10:30 am on Monday morning, DeepSeek claimed to have resolved the issue as services resumed for its millions of subscribers in China, SE Asia and other parts of the world.
Built by DeepSeek lab, its namesake AI model ‘DeepSeek R1’ shook the stock markets back in January 2025 with nearly $600 billion wiped off Nvidia’s market cap. Built under $6 million and based on open-source, DeepSeek competes with its main rival ChatGPT of OpenAI on several benchmarks including reasoning and coding.
However, the AI tool has been banned by several governments including US, Australia and Italy over fears of data privacy, DeepSeek’s router servers go to China.
SCMP reports that this is not the first time DeepSeek has experienced a power outage as back in January 2025, its pathbreaking R1 reasoning model was also hit by denial-of-service attacks.
