DeepSeek offers credits after nearly five-hour outage
At 8:11am Beijing time on October 15, requests to DeepSeek began failing. The V4 Pro API and V4.1 Flash API were restored at 1:04pm Beijing time that Thursday. DeepSeek's chatbot returned at the same time, ending an outage that lasted four hours and 53 minutes.
The disruption reached users around the world and affected third-party applications that rely on DeepSeek's models. Some users posted error messages on social media, including "server temporarily unavailable." Requests stopped, and chat conversations were interrupted. DeepSeek said it had launched an investigation and begun remediation.
Credits cover October consumption
DeepSeek apologised and said it would issue credits for users' consumption from October 8 to 14, a seven-day period that extends beyond the outage itself. The credits will be added automatically to eligible accounts, and future charges will first be deducted from the balance. That means the refund comes as API credits, not money returned to a bank account or original payment method. The notice appeared on the Hangzhou-based start-up's API platform. The restoration was reported by CGTN.
The company said it had identified the cause and that repairs were under way. DeepSeek also plans to review its infrastructure to eliminate single points of failure. Under the compensation terms reported by TokenPost, credits will reflect each account's spending during the seven-day period.
