DeepSeek’s chatbot suffered a major outage of more than seven hours overnight in China, forcing the AI pioneer to deploy several updates to rectify the issue.Users began reporting faults on the evening of March 29, according to Downdetector. The startup’s own status page acknowledged an initial issue at 9.35pm before marking the incident resolved two hours later.Subsequent updates on March 30 showed DeepSeek addressing another case of performance issues that took until 10.33am to be fixed. The causes of the outages remain unclear, and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment.The extended downtime is unusual for a…