DeepSeek offers user refunds after suffering another major outage
Por Iris Deng — South China Morning Post – News feed
Advertisement Artificial intelligence Tech Big Tech DeepSeek offers user refunds after suffering another major outage
Chinese AI firm apologises and offers one-week refund after its chatbot and API services went offline for nearly five hours
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Iris Deng in Shenzhen Published: 8:55pm, 15 Oct 2026
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”.
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