DeepSeek outage: Is rising AI giant facing new crisis?

New Delhi: Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek experienced its largest-ever outage on Sunday night, leaving users unable to access the platform for over seven hours and raising questions about the reliability of the popular AI service.

According to outage-monitoring platform Downdetector, users first reported issues on Sunday evening, with multiple complaints surfacing before DeepSeek’s status page acknowledged the problem at 9:35 pm. The platform initially marked the issue as resolved two hours later, but disruptions recurred and continued until 10:33 am the following day.

The startup has not provided an official statement explaining the cause of the outage.

DeepSeek’s track record

Since the launch of its R1 AI model in January 2025, DeepSeek has maintained an operational record of nearly 99 per cent, according to its status page. The platform gained sudden popularity early in 2025, when its AI models reportedly triggered a selloff in Silicon Valley tech stocks, wiping out billions of dollars in market value and prompting fears over the United States’ lead in the AI race.

Despite this attention, DeepSeek has yet to deliver AI models on par with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, developed by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic respectively.

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Allegations of AI model misuse

Recently, US-based AI firm Anthropic accused three Chinese unicorns, including DeepSeek, of illegally extracting capabilities from its Claude model to advance their own AI systems.

The allegations involve the creation of around 24,000 fraudulent accounts to train Chinese AI models using more than 16 million exchanges with Claude. Anthropic has raised national security concerns, warning that models developed in this way may lack essential safety guardrails and could be misused for cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, mass surveillance, or even biological weapons development.

The US firm cautioned that such AI models could enable authoritarian governments to deploy advanced AI for offensive operations, stressing that the "window to act is narrow."

As DeepSeek works to restore full functionality, the outage underscores the growing global scrutiny of Chinese AI startups and their compliance with international standards for safety and security in artificial intelligence.

IANS