(Yicai) March 30 -- DeepSeek's artificial intelligence chatbot is back up and running again after a major service outage in China overnight.

The popular chatbot’s official status website reported the outage as resolved at 10.33 a.m. today after first acknowledging an issue at 9.35 p.m. yesterday. The Hangzhou-based AI startup has not yet commented on the cause.

Users reported that DeepSeek’s web page and app displayed "server busy" prompts or completely failed to respond during the hours-long outage. A message saying “Please check your network and try again" appeared when Yicai tried using the chatbot.

“Public demand for DeepSeek is simply too massive,” one user wrote on social media. “Many users keep clicking ‘Retry’ due to lag, which causes a surge in access attempts, making maintenance even more difficult.”

DeepSeek vaulted onto the global stage in January last year with the release of its ChatGPT-style R1 large language model, which paired strong reasoning performance with dramatically lower operating costs. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously described it as an “AI Sputnik moment.”

DeepSeek ranked second among Chinese AI-native apps with 135 million monthly active users as of last December, behind only ByteDance's Doubao with 226 million, according to data released by research institution Quest Mobile on March 3.

Editor: Martin Kadiev