DeepSeek offers compensation after restoring from service outage

DeepSeek restored its application programming interface (API) and Chat Service at 1:04 p.m. Beijing Time on Thursday, after an outage that began in the morning.

The Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company said on its status page that three components were affected: DeepSeek V4 Pro API service, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash API service and Chat Service.

In a notice titled "Service Restoration and Compensation Notice," DeepSeek said it would refund the amount consumed from October 8 to 14 in the form of credit, which will be deposited automatically, and API billing deductions will be taken from the credit account first.

The company apologized and said it had launched a comprehensive investigation and corrective effort focused on service stability, adding that it had reviewed and eliminated single points of dependency to prevent similar issues from recurring. The notice did not disclose the root cause.

The status page showed eight incidents in September and two additional incidents between August and October.

The outage occurred during a weekday morning in China, making "DeepSeek down" a trending topic on the social media platform Weibo. The API disruption also affected third-party applications that rely on DeepSeek's models.