Infrastructure Failure: DeepSeek API and Web Services Experience Long Outage

The scaling problem is clearly demonstrated in practice. On March 31, 2026, the Chinese AI giant DeepSeek recorded severe performance degradation of its Web and API services. The incident resulted in the longest outage since the platform's viral rise in early 2025.

The company's official status page confirmed the system crash and the inability to process requests. This failure is a direct consequence of the colossal load on the inference infrastructure. While Huawei is just rolling out the new Ascend 950PR chips, current capacities are clearly insufficient to maintain a high SLA amidst global traffic. This is a strict engineering lesson for anyone designing B2B architecture: fully tying corporate pipelines to a single API provider without fallback algorithms carries critical business risks.

Source: DeepSeek Status / Reuters