Outage hits Chinese chatbot of tech unicorn Moonshot AI amid surging user interest
- Moonshot AI says it is working to expand the service capacity of its Kimi chatbot, which has been adding new users rapidly
- The start-up, which is valued at US$2.5 billion, says Kimi can now process 2 million Chinese characters during conversations
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Moonshot AI had an outage that lasted for at least two days, as enthusiastic users rushed to get a taste of the Kimi chatbot, its answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The Beijing-based company said it first observed an “abnormal continuous increase in system traffic” on Kimi at 9.30am on Wednesday, according to a company notice to its developers cited by local media.
The notice reportedly said that clients who used the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform started to run into system errors at 10am, as traffic rose much faster than what the system is designed to support.
“We’re deeply sorry for this,” Moonshot AI said in the notice.
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Moonshot AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The service breakdown began on the same day the company announced a technological breakthrough for its Kimi chatbot, which can now process up to 2 million Chinese characters during conversations, up from 200,000 characters previously.