DeepSeek's API was down for almost five hours, and its refund is a week of credits

Plenty of teams run their high-volume work on DeepSeek's Flash model because it is cheap and good enough, and we covered its new search tools here on 18th Oct'26. Five hours without it is a different kind of cost, because the credit pays back your own API spend but not the customers who saw a broken product during a working morning in Asia, or the agent runs that stopped halfway. None of this is a reason to drop a cheap provider, but if one sits in your production path you need a second model your code can switch to when it stops answering, tested before the outage rather than during it. Routers such as OpenRouter can handle the switch for you, though only if the fallback model reads your prompts well enough, which is worth checking on a real task this week.