DeepSeek offers user refunds after another major service outage

Chinese AI company DeepSeek has said it will offer refunds or service credits to users affected by a major outage, the latest in a series of reliability issues the company has faced as demand for its chatbot and API services has grown.

The company said the disruption left users unable to access its services for an extended period, affecting both the consumer-facing chatbot and developers relying on its API for third party applications. DeepSeek has not published a detailed account of what caused the outage, though it said affected accounts would automatically receive compensation.

The incident adds to a pattern of intermittent service disruptions that have accompanied DeepSeek's rapid growth over the past year. The company's low cost, high performance models drew a surge of new users following its initial breakout success, placing significant strain on its infrastructure at times of peak demand.

Outages of this kind have become a recurring challenge for fast growing AI companies more broadly, as providers race to scale up computing capacity fast enough to keep pace with user growth. Industry analysts say reliability is increasingly becoming a competitive factor alongside model performance and price, particularly for business customers building products on top of AI APIs.

DeepSeek has not said whether the latest outage will prompt broader infrastructure changes, though the company has previously pointed to capacity expansion as an ongoing priority.