DeepSeek hit by record 7-hour outage amid US theft accusations
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New Delhi: China's DeepSeek AI chatbot endured its longest outage ever, offline for over seven hours overnight, disrupting users worldwide.
Downdetector logged initial complaints Sunday evening, with DeepSeek's status page noting issues at 9:35 pm—initially resolved after two hours, but recurring until 10:33 am Monday. No official cause has been disclosed.
The glitch dents DeepSeek's near-99% uptime since launching its R1 model in January 2025, when it sparked a Silicon Valley stock selloff by challenging US AI dominance. Yet it trails scale-wise behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
Tensions escalated as US rival Anthropic accused DeepSeek and two other Chinese firms of "distilling" Claude's capabilities via 24,000 fake accounts and 16 million illicit exchanges. Anthropic warns these models bypass safety guardrails, risking cyberattacks, bioweapons, disinformation, and authoritarian surveillance. "The window to act is narrow," it cautioned.
(Inputs from IANS)