Chinese AI firm DeepSeek suffered its longest outage—nearly 13 hours from March
29–30—sparking global discussion and viral posts on Weibo and Reddit. The
disruption fueled speculation that a new model, possibly V4, was quietly
deployed. Early users and developers reported markedly improved coding structure
and reasoning in tests, suggesting a significant upgrade despite the system
still identifying as V3. While unconfirmed, benchmark leaks and user
observations point to a potential major release rather than a routine failure.