DeepSeek Suffers Longest Outage in Over a Year Amid Preparations for Major New AI Model Launch

DeepSeek suffers its longest outage in over a year, with two incidents totaling more than eight hours of downtime on March 29-30, 2026, just as the Chinese AI startup prepares to launch its next major model, V4, a multimodal system trained with help from Huawei and Cambricon.

• Chinese AI startup DeepSeek experiences one of its longest outages in over a year, with two separate incidents on March 29-30, 2026 totaling more than eight hours of downtime affecting its web chat services.
• The cause of the outage remains unknown, marking a rare disruption for DeepSeek, which has maintained nearly 100% uptime for several consecutive months following early instability after the launch of its R1 model.
• DeepSeek is preparing to release its next major model, V4, a multimodal system supporting image, video, and text generation, trained with help from Chinese chipmakers Huawei and Cambricon, amid intensifying competition from rival Chinese AI firms.