DeepSeek Down? Chinese AI Chatbot Hit by Outage as Users Report App and Website Problems Across the US

NEW YORK — Users of DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot, reported widespread problems accessing the service Wednesday evening, with the company acknowledging a partial disruption affecting its chat service and developer tools.

Outage-tracking website Downdetector flagged the problems in a post on X. "User reports indicate problems with DeepSeek since 8:56 PM EDT," the site said, inviting affected users to share their experiences under the hashtag #DeepseekDown.

Complaints began rising earlier in the evening, with reports on Downdetector surging around 8:24 p.m. Eastern time, according to a community outage tracker that monitored the incident.

Company acknowledges issue

DeepSeek's official status page reported a partial outage affecting its web service and its application programming interface, which developers use to build DeepSeek's AI models into their own products.

The incident, listed in Chinese and English as "DeepSeek Web/API Partially Unavailable," affected the company's chat service and its DeepSeek V4.1 Flash API service.

"The issue is being investigated to identify the cause," the status page said.

The company did not provide an estimated time for full restoration. It was not immediately clear how many users were affected or whether the problems extended to all regions.

What users are reporting

Users in the United States reported difficulties with the DeepSeek app, website access and logging in. App-related problems accounted for 57% of reports, according to figures cited in media coverage of the disruption.

Some users on social media and online forums described the chatbot becoming unresponsive or failing to load answers, while others complained about recurring downtime in recent weeks.

Outage reports also appeared on other tracking services, including StatusGator, where users flagged connectivity problems with the chatbot.

A string of recent disruptions

Wednesday's problems follow a series of service interruptions for DeepSeek in recent weeks.

DeepSeek recorded 12 incidents in the past 30 days, totaling about 67 minutes of disruption, according to an AI service status tracker. That works out to about 99.8% uptime, placing it in the middle of the AI applications the tracker monitors.

On Oct. 12, the company's API was not responding or experienced connectivity issues for about 35 minutes, according to StatusGator. An incident on Oct. 1 lasted about two hours and 45 minutes.

Other user-reported disruptions in recent months included problems with messages being delayed or not sending, server overload errors and "server busy" messages that prevented users from getting answers.

The status tracker said most DeepSeek incidents have been resolved quickly, typically within about 16 minutes, though major incidents can take much longer. The longest single incident in the past month lasted about three hours.

Fast-growing AI challenger

DeepSeek, developed by the Chinese company of the same name, burst onto the global AI scene in January 2025, when it released a chatbot based on its DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model. Its performance at a fraction of the cost of rival systems drew widespread attention and briefly rattled U.S. technology stocks.

The company has since released a series of models, including DeepSeek V4 and V4 Pro in April 2026. Its open-weight models, which developers can download and run themselves, have become widely used.

DeepSeek also offers access to its models through a usage-based API, which many businesses and developers rely on to power their own applications. Outages affecting the API can disrupt not only individual users but also companies that have built services on top of DeepSeek's technology.

Rapid growth strains capacity

Popular AI services have frequently experienced outages as demand surges. Running large AI models requires significant computing power, and sudden spikes in traffic can overwhelm servers.

DeepSeek faced capacity problems shortly after its initial launch, when a flood of new users led to service disruptions and limits on new registrations.

Other major AI chatbots, including those from U.S. companies, have also experienced periodic outages as usage has grown.

What users can do

Users experiencing problems can check DeepSeek's official status page for updates on the incident and its resolution.

Switching between the mobile app and web version, or restarting the app, may help in some cases. However, if a broader outage is underway, repeatedly retrying is unlikely to resolve the issue, and service typically returns once the underlying problem is fixed.

Developers relying on DeepSeek's API may want to monitor the status page and consider fallback options for critical applications during disruptions.

Developing story

DeepSeek has not publicly disclosed the cause of Wednesday's disruption. The company typically posts updates on its status page when an issue has been identified and resolved.

This is a developing story and may be updated.