DeepSeek restores chat and API services after nearly five-hour outage
DeepSeek restored its hosted chat and application programming interface (API) services on Thursday, 15 October, after an interruption lasting nearly five hours. The Chinese artificial intelligence company apologised and announced compensation in account credits for a week of API usage. Its public incident record now marks the disruption as resolved, but does not explain the underlying technical cause.
The South China Morning Post reported that DeepSeek’s chatbot and API services for its V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash models went offline on Thursday morning. Users encountered messages saying the server was temporarily unavailable. The interruption affected both people trying to hold a conversation with the chatbot and developers accessing its models through an API.
A morning interruption, followed by monitored recovery
DeepSeek’s official incident timeline records the disruption from 00:11 to 05:04 UTC on 15 October—08:11 to 13:04 in China Standard Time. The affected components were Chat Service, V4 Pro API and V4.1 Flash API. The nearly five-hour window describes this incident’s recorded duration, rather than the length of every individual user’s unsuccessful session.
During the response, DeepSeek said it had identified the cause and was implementing a fix. TechNode reported that the company moved the incident into monitoring at 12:49 Beijing time, after implementing the fix. DeepSeek’s subsequent resolved entry came at 13:04, providing a later restoration update than reports written while monitoring was still under way.
That sequence matters for readers encountering earlier headlines or error reports: Thursday’s morning outage is no longer listed as ongoing. The company’s final status entry confirms resolution of the recorded incident; it does not supply a technical postmortem or a breakdown of how each affected component failed.
Compensation covers the preceding week’s API consumption
According to The Paper’s original reporting, DeepSeek said it would return the full amount consumed by user accounts from 8 through 14 October as bonus credits. The credits would arrive automatically, and subsequent API charges would be deducted from that bonus balance first.
This is compensation tied to the preceding seven days of usage, not simply reimbursement for requests attempted during Thursday’s interruption. It is also an account-credit arrangement, not an announced cash payment. The notice does not provide a total compensation figure or a count of eligible accounts, so neither measure can be used to quantify the outage’s scale.
The disruption overlapped the working-day morning in China. The Paper reported that ordinary users and business developers relying on API access were affected. This gives the incident a significance beyond an unavailable chat screen: the same response service was also inaccessible to software making requests on users’ behalf. The reporting did not establish a consolidated financial-loss estimate for those businesses.
Stability review promised; technical explanation still absent
DeepSeek also said it had begun a comprehensive review of service stability and would identify and remove single-point dependencies as part of corrective work. Those are the company’s announced response measures. They are not, by themselves, a published finding about the precise component responsible for this outage.
Although DeepSeek’s incident updates said the cause had been identified, the public timeline did not disclose what it was. The Paper said the company declined further comment by its publication time. Service restoration and an explanation of the failure therefore remain separate developments: the former is recorded, while a detailed public account of the latter was not available in the material reviewed for this report.
Readers can follow the relevant service through SID’s DeepSeek page and check real-time service availability. For ongoing visibility into the services you depend on, explore Status Is Down’s plans and create an account. More independently corroborated incident coverage is available in the SID News archive.
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