Is DeepSeek Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of deepseek.com plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-07-22

How to check right now

Step 1 -- Load the site
Open deepseek.com→

The simplest check. If it loads and you can log in, the tool is up for you.

Step 2 -- Crowdsourced reports
DownDetector: DeepSeek→

User-reported outages aggregated across regions. Good signal for partial or regional outages.

Step 3 -- Live social
Search X for “DeepSeekdown” →

Live tweets from other users. Fastest signal for a fresh outage -- often beats status pages by 10-20 minutes.

Step 4 -- Official status page
Find DeepSeek's status page →

Most vendors publish a status page at status.[domain] or on Statuspage.io. Google-search to find the current URL.

Known issues we've tracked

LEGACY API ALIASES RETIRE 2026-07-24 (vendor-primary, HARD deadline): **`deepseek-chat` and `deepseek-reasoner` will be fully retired and inaccessible after July 24, 2026, 15:59 UTC.** The aliases currently route to deepseek-v4-flash (non-thinking/thinking respectively). Migration is a one-line change: keep base_url, update `model` to `deepseek-v4-pro` or `deepseek-v4-flash` -- but note the gotcha that `deepseek-reasoner` maps to FLASH-tier thinking, not V4-Pro, so 'upgrading' to Pro changes both cost and behavior. Any production code still pinned to the legacy aliases breaks on the 24th
2026-07-24•DeepSeek API docs (api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260424)
V4 OFFICIAL RELEASE MID-JULY + FIRST PEAK/OFF-PEAK PRICING (announced 2026-06-30): DeepSeek scheduled the **official (non-preview) V4 release for mid-July 2026**, with 1M context across the lineup -- and will introduce **time-of-day API pricing for the first time: peak hours (9:00-12:00 and 14:00-18:00 daily) billed at 2x the off-peak rate**, effective alongside the release. STATUS as of 2026-07-22: the vendor news page (api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260424) STILL labels V4 as 'Preview' and the peak/off-peak rate card has not been published as text (only a pricing image), so treat 'GA' as imminent-but-not-confirmed; community reporting points to a WAIC-timed reveal (~7/20-26, Shanghai). What IS locked is the **7/24 15:59 UTC legacy-alias retirement** (see entry above) -- that is the hard, vendor-confirmed date. If you batch heavy workloads, shifting them off-peak will halve token costs once the rate card lands
2026-06-30•TechNode (technode.com/2026/06/30/deepseek-to-launch-v4-in-mid-july-with-new-peak-time-api-pricing/), DeepSeek API docs (api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260424, re-checked 2026-07-22 -- still 'Preview')
Regional availability restrictions: EU, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and India issued formal restrictions or bans on deployment of DeepSeek-V3 and the enterprise API in Q1 2026 over data-residency concerns (traffic routing through mainland China). Germany's BSI confirmed classified metadata leak from a parliamentary pilot. If you're deploying DeepSeek in any of these jurisdictions, check local compliance guidance before shipping; self-hosted open-weights deployment is often the workaround but changes the operational picture
2026-Q1•National CSIRT/BSI statements (aggregated), Alibaba policy analysis
DeepSeek V4 SHIPPED 2026-04-24. Two-model family released simultaneously: V4-Pro (1.6T total / 49B active MoE) and V4-Flash (284B / 13B active MoE). Both default to 1M context natively, use DeepSeek's new Hybrid Attention Architecture, and are open-sourced on HuggingFace under MIT license. V4-Pro trails only Gemini 3.1 Pro on world-knowledge benchmarks per early third-party runs. API pricing: Flash $0.14/$0.28, Pro $1.74/$3.48 per 1M tokens -- still 3-10x cheaper than Western frontier models. Tier-1 coverage: Bloomberg, CNBC, TechCrunch, Simon Willison blog. This closes out the 'V4 imminent' watchlist item that was open since 2026-04-03 Reuters pre-report
2026-04-24•DeepSeek API docs, Bloomberg, CNBC, TechCrunch, Simon Willison
PRICE CUT NOW PERMANENT (confirmed 2026-05-26 via the official pricing page): the 75%-off V4-Pro promo does NOT revert on 2026-05-31. DeepSeek's pricing docs state V4-Pro pricing 'will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC' -- i.e. the discounted rate ($0.435 input / $0.87 output per 1M; cache-hit input $0.003625/M) becomes the new standing list price, down from $1.74 / $3.48. Tech press (The Next Web, Engadget) framed it as DeepSeek making the price war permanent. V4-Flash is unchanged at $0.14 / $0.28. The 'lock in now before the promo ends' framing no longer applies -- this is simply the price now
2026-05-26•DeepSeek pricing docs (api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing), The Next Web, Engadget
Third-party verification (T+3 days post-launch): Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index pegs V4-Pro at 52 (#2 open-weight, behind Kimi K2.6) and V4-Flash at 47. Vals AI: V4 is #1 open-weight on Vibe Code Bench 'and it's not close', plus #1 open-weight on SWE-bench. SWE-bench Verified 80.6% (effectively tied with Claude Opus 4.6's 80.8%). Codeforces 3206 surpasses GPT-5.4 (3168) -- highest competitive-programming score at release. GDPval-AA agentic 1554 leads all open-weight models. BUT LMSYS Chatbot Arena Elo around 1220 places V4-Pro alongside GPT-4o and Claude 4 Sonnet, not at the Opus-class frontier (1280+). Simon Willison's pelican-SVG community test produced visibly weak output from V4-Pro (one wing, oversized body) and concluded V4-Pro is 3-6 months behind US frontier labs at a fraction of the cost. Practical verdict: best-in-class open-weight for code/agents/math, mid-pack for general chat quality, weakest for creative/visual generation. Hallucination rate 94%/96% (Pro/Flash) per AA-Omniscience -- caveat for fact-sensitive workloads
2026-04-27•Artificial Analysis, Vals AI, Simon Willison, LMSYS Chatbot Arena, Codeforces

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if DeepSeek is down

Top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives in the same category, ordered by our overall score.

A

Qwen (Alibaba)

8.8

Alibaba's open-weights + API family -- Qwen3.8-Max flagship previewed at WAIC (Jul 19 2026: 2.4T sparse-MoE multimodal, closed preview, 'second only to Fable 5'), Qwen 3.7 Max GA (SWE-Bench Pro 60.6%, Terminal-Bench 69.7%, $2.50/$7.50 per 1M), Qwen3.6-27B dense Apache 2.0 (beats the 397B MoE on coding from one consumer GPU)

A

MiniMax M3

8.4

MiniMax's coding/agent flagship -- M3 (June 1 2026): 1M-token context, MSA sparse attention (>15x decoding speedup at long context), SWE-Bench Pro 59.0%, Terminal-Bench 66.0%. OPEN WEIGHTS LIVE on HuggingFace since June 12 (~428B total / ~23B active, native multimodal, minimax-community license)

A

Gemma 4 (Google)

8.3

Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices

A

IBM Granite 4.0

8.2

IBM's enterprise-focused open-weight family -- Granite 4.0 hybrid Mamba-2 + transformer architecture (70-80% memory reduction vs pure transformer), 3B to 32B sizes, Apache 2.0. First open model family to secure ISO 42001 certification. Nano 350M runs on CPU with 8-16GB RAM. 3B Vision variant landed 2026-04-01

A

Kimi K3 (Moonshot)

8.1

Moonshot's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 (launched 2026-07-16/17) is the largest open-weight model ever announced -- 1M context, multimodal, $3/$15 per 1M via API, ranked best-available on Arena.AI at launch. Weights promised late July (press cites 7/27); K2.6/K2.7-Code remain the shipped-weights line

About DeepSeek

Tier A (8.0/10). DeepSeek V4 shipped 2026-04-24: V4-Pro (1.6T/49B active MoE) + V4-Flash (284B/13B active), 1M native context, Hybrid Attention Architecture, open-source on HF. Trails only Gemini 3.1 Pro on world knowledge

Read the full DeepSeekreview →