DeepSeek offers user refunds after suffering another major outage

Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek apologised and promised compensation to users after its services suffered a nearly five-hour outage on Thursday.

DeepSeek will issue users a full refund for any consumption between October 8 and October 14 in the form of credits, according to a notice posted on the Hangzhou-based start-up’s application programming interface (API) platform.

DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot and API services for its V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash models went offline on Thursday morning, affecting users globally, before being restored over four hours and 50 minutes later at around 1pm.

Some users turned to social media to share the error messages they had encountered when trying to use DeepSeek, such as “server temporarily unavailable”.

“We immediately launched a comprehensive investigation and thorough rectification effort focused on service stability, and have comprehensively reviewed and eliminated single points of dependency to resolutely prevent similar issues from recurring,” DeepSeek said in the notice, without elaborating on the cause of the incident.

“We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and disruption this may have caused.”

The incident came as the company faces mounting infrastructure pressure amid surging compute demand. DeepSeek is looking to expand its teams and computing infrastructure as competition intensifies, with a plan to add about 1 gigawatt of computing capacity in China’s northern Inner Mongolia autonomous region, according to a Bloomberg report.

DeepSeek has faced recurring service disruptions, but the latest outage was one of the most severe it has experienced in recent months. The platform also suffered a major disruption in March that lasted for around 12 hours, affecting hundreds of millions of users.

In late January last year, shortly after the then little-known lab released its R1 reasoning model and made it free globally, DeepSeek was hit by denial-of-service attacks meant to overwhelm its servers and bandwidth with a flood of internet traffic. The company described them as “large-scale malicious attacks” at the time.