DeepSeek to refund users after nearly five-hour global outage
Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek apologised for a nearly five-hour outage on October 15, 2026, and said it will refund all usage from October 8 to 14 as credits.
DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based artificial intelligence start-up, apologised to users on Thursday, October 15, 2026, after its services went down for close to five hours. The company said it would compensate those affected. The incident adds to a series of major disruptions the firm has experienced.
According to a notice published on DeepSeek's application programming interface (API) platform, the company will give users a full refund for everything they consumed between October 8 and October 14. The money will not be returned in cash but issued as credits on the platform.
Chatbot and API both offline
The failure began on Thursday morning and took down both the company's namesake chatbot and the API services for its V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash models. Users around the world were affected. Service came back roughly four hours and 50 minutes later, at about 1pm.
While the systems were down, some users posted screenshots on social media of the errors they were seeing when trying to reach DeepSeek. Among the most common was a message saying the server was temporarily unavailable.
A test of reliability
DeepSeek has become one of the most closely watched Chinese AI developers, known for low-cost, openly released models that compete with Western rivals. For developers and businesses that build on its API, however, uptime matters as much as benchmark scores. An outage lasting several hours means every application relying on DeepSeek's models is disrupted for just as long.
Refunding a full week of usage for an outage that lasted a few hours is a generous gesture by industry standards. It appears aimed at keeping customers on board after repeated reliability problems. The company did not publicly detail what caused the disruption.
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