DeepSeek Goes Dark for 7 Hours; Apple Turns Siri Into an AI Marketplace

China's top AI chatbot suffers its worst outage as Apple moves to monetize the AI platform war through App Store economics.

🤖 DeepSeek Goes Dark for Seven Hours — Longest Outage Since Its January Debut

Decoded: DeepSeek's chatbot suffered its longest service disruption since its January 2025 debut, going offline for more than seven hours beginning Sunday evening China time. The outage affected users across China and impacted an estimated 355 million registered users, according to outage tracking platform Downdetector, which recorded the surge in error reports beginning around 9:30 AM ET Sunday. DeepSeek deployed multiple software updates throughout the outage period before service was restored. The company has not disclosed the technical root cause. This marks the most significant infrastructure failure for the Chinese AI lab since its R1 model triggered a global AI market selloff in January 2025 by demonstrating competitive performance at a fraction of the compute cost of U.S. rivals. (Bloomberg, March 30, 2026)

Why it matters: DeepSeek's infrastructure reliability is now a direct competitive variable. Enterprise customers — particularly those in Chinese financial services, government, and large-scale tech deployments — evaluate AI vendor uptime alongside model quality. A seven-hour outage on a Sunday is a moderate event for a consumer chatbot but a serious signal for enterprise procurement teams. The incident also reopens the question of whether DeepSeek's low-cost model advantage comes with corresponding infrastructure investment constraints. For U.S. AI companies competing with DeepSeek on cost, reliability is now a differentiated selling point — Anthropic and OpenAI have maintained strong uptime records at enterprise scale.

🛠 Apple's Siri AI Extensions Get a Dedicated App Store Section — Building an AI Marketplace

Decoded: Apple is creating a dedicated App Store section for third-party AI extensions in iOS 27, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reporting March 29. The company is opening Siri and Apple Intelligence to third-party services through an Extensions framework, allowing AI apps to integrate directly with Siri. The dedicated section makes the iOS 27 AI Extensions feature function as a curated AI marketplace — each extension listed, discoverable, and transacted through Apple's standard App Store infrastructure. Apple earns its standard 15–30% commission on any premium AI subscription sold or upgraded through the marketplace. The move extends the iOS 27 chatbot multi-integration announcement: rather than just supporting Claude and Gemini alongside ChatGPT, Apple is building infrastructure for any qualifying AI app to plug into Siri at scale. (Bloomberg Power On, The Verge, March 29, 2026)

Why it matters: Apple (AAPL) is executing the same platform-layer strategy it applied to music, apps, and payments: let competitors build the products, then collect economics at the point of distribution. An AI Extensions App Store section transforms Siri from a product into a marketplace. Every AI subscription sold through iOS — whether OpenAI Plus, Claude Pro, or Gemini Advanced — becomes an App Store transaction subject to Apple's commission structure. With over 1 billion active iPhone users, the addressable transaction volume is material. For Microsoft (MSFT) and Google, gaining Siri distribution removes the need for separate iPhone marketing spend. For OpenAI, losing ChatGPT exclusivity has a commercial offset: its existing iOS user base now competes on a level shelf — but Apple, not OpenAI, captures the distribution margin.

Stay decoded. See you tomorrow.

— The Get AI Decoded Team