DeepSeek outage lasts nearly five hours; week of API spending refunded as credits

DeepSeek's web chat, mobile app, and the APIs for its V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash models were down for 4 hours and 52 minutes on October 15, from 08:11 to 13:04 Beijing time, during peak weekday working hours, according to the company's status page.

DeepSeek apologized, said it has opened a full investigation and will identify and eliminate single points of failure, and compensated API customers with credits equal to their entire previous week of API spending (October 8 to 14), applied automatically with no expiration. Some users reported credits above 1,000 yuan. PANews counts at least 18 large-scale service anomalies at DeepSeek in 2026, including an outage of more than 12 hours in late March.

Sources: TechNode, BigGo Finance, PANews