Krux
March 31, 2026
DeepSeek Goes Dark for 7 Hours in Longest Outage
Published: March 31, 2026 at 12:32 AM
Updated: March 31, 2026 at 12:32 AM
100-word summary
DeepSeek's chatbot went offline for over seven hours starting late Sunday, marking its longest outage since going viral in early 2025. The web interface died at 9:35 PM and didn't recover until Monday morning. The API stayed up, meaning developers could still build while regular users stared at error screens. DeepSeek never explained what broke. The timing was awkward: status logs show another "service abnormality" hit the same weekend. For anyone who switched from ChatGPT or Claude betting on reliability, this is the reminder that uptime isn't guaranteed just because the model is cheap and fast.
What happened
DeepSeek's chatbot went offline for over seven hours starting late Sunday, marking its longest outage since going viral in early 2025. The web interface died at 9:35 PM and didn't recover until Monday morning. The API stayed up, meaning developers could still build while regular users stared at error screens. DeepSeek never explained what broke. The timing was awkward: status logs show another "service abnormality" hit the same weekend.
Why it matters
For anyone who switched from ChatGPT or Claude betting on reliability, this is the reminder that uptime isn't guaranteed just because the model is cheap and fast.