DeepSeek offers user refunds after suffering another major outage

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek issued refunds and apologized to users following a significant outage that lasted nearly five hours on Thursday. The company, based in Hangzhou, promised compensation for any consumption between October 8 and October 14, providing users with credits as a form of reimbursement. DeepSeek's chatbot and API services for its V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash models were offline, impacting users worldwide, before being restored around 1pm.

Users encountered error messages like "server temporarily unavailable" on social media. DeepSeek assured it had launched an investigation and rectified the issue, resolving single points of dependency to prevent similar occurrences. The incident occurred amid mounting infrastructure pressure due to increased compute demand. As the company aims to expand its teams and computing infrastructure, it plans to add about 1 gigawatt of computing capacity in northern China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, according to a Bloomberg report.

This was one of the most severe outages DeepSeek has faced recently, following a major disruption in March that lasted for around 12 hours and affected hundreds of millions of users. In January, DeepSeek experienced denial-of-service attacks, which were described as large-scale malicious attacks.