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: 2026-04-18

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

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 IMMINENT: Per Reuters (citing The Information) on 2026-04-03, V4 launches in 'next few weeks' running on Huawei Ascend chips. Expected late April / early May 2026. Rumored to be a unified hybrid reasoning + non-reasoning model (~1T params, 1M context) that subsumes both V3 and R2 -- DeepSeek is reportedly skipping a separate R2 release entirely
2026-04•Reuters, The Information, Gizchina
Refuses to engage with questions about Tiananmen Square, Taiwan sovereignty, and other politically sensitive topics per Chinese regulations
2026-01•Reddit r/LocalLLaMA
API latency spikes during peak hours, sometimes timing out entirely on longer reasoning chains
2026-02•GitHub Issues

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 -- Qwen 3.6-Max-Preview (Apr 20 2026 CLOSED-weights #1 on SWE-bench Pro/Terminal-Bench 2.0/SciCode), Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (Apr 16 open-weights coding champion), plus Qwen 3.6-Plus API flagship. Apache 2.0 on most sizes, but the best model is now proprietary

A

MiniMax M2 / M2.5

8.4

MiniMax's open-weights frontier -- first open model to match Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench at 10-20× lower cost

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 K2.5 (Moonshot)

8.1

Moonshot's 1T-parameter MoE open-weights flagship -- best open-source agentic coder, rivals Claude Opus 4.5

About DeepSeek

Tier A (8.0/10). Near-frontier reasoning for pennies on the dollar -- the open-source LLM that made Silicon Valley nervous

Read the full DeepSeekreview →