I opened status.deepseek.com today and there’s a red banner at the top: “DeepSeek Web/API Partially Disrupted.” The small text below reads “Root cause identified, fix being implemented.” It’s been going on for 2 hours.
My first reaction wasn’t to curse them—it was to curse my router.
Suspecting Yourself First Has Become a Conditioned Reflex
Last time was October 2. That day I dragged myself out of bed past five in the morning, opened DeepSeek—the webpage loaded, it just responded slowly. My first reaction wasn’t “it’s down” but “is my home LAN’s DNS broken?” After fiddling around for a while, I opened the status page: yellow, “Partial service performance degradation,” investigating, ongoing for 1 hour.
Two weeks later today, here it is again—this time not yellow but red. What’s affected is still the same stuff: conversation service, V4.1 Flash API service, plus 1 other component—exactly the path I’m using.
My sequence of actions today was identical to that time, and very honest: refresh first, then open a different webpage to test my own internet speed, and only at the very end did I remember that there exists something in this world called a status page.
When a service makes your first reaction “did my side disconnect?”, it means your reliability expectation for it has already been adjusted very low. That’s not their fault—it’s something I dialed down myself.
What Does 99.68% Actually Mean
The three numbers at the bottom of the status page: V4 Pro 99.92%, V4.1 Flash 99.68%, Conversation Service 99.84%.
Individually they look pretty good. But 99.68% restated means: out of every thousand hours, more than three hours it’s unhealthy—and this is still the old tally from October 2; today’s incident hasn’t even been counted yet. Just today alone, the status page itself has already acknowledged two hours.
In other words, within this whole stretch of “uptime,” incidents are concentrated in a few solid blocks of time, not sprinkled evenly. For someone who writes code, evenly losing 0.3% doesn’t matter; losing a concentrated two hours really hurts—because you happen to be working during those two hours.
Why Is It Always Them Going Down
I don’t know, and I’m not going to pretend I do. All I can offer are a few guesses, which I’ll mark as guesses.
Inference services aren’t the same as regular web services. Web services can just add machines when capacity is short; behind an inference service is a whole row of GPUs—throughput depends on VRAM, scheduling, and batch concurrency. Short-term capacity is rigid; you can’t just order an expansion and get it the same day.
Then there’s pricing. Their pricing has consistently squeezed margins to a position competitors dare not follow, and squeezing margins usually means redundancy is kept thin. Redundancy is invisible in normal times—you only see it on the day something breaks.
One more thing: when it blew up it was a national-level event; traffic peaks don’t follow patterns the way developer services do.
Which of these is actually true, DeepSeek knows. All I know is one other thing: “Root cause identified, fix being implemented”—I have a feeling I’ve seen this sentence quite a few times already.
What Actually Made Me Switch Wasn’t the Outages
Outages I can tolerate; worst case I switch to a different model and keep going.
What made me remove it from the default slot was code quality. What v4 produces genuinely isn’t good enough—not good enough to the point where I have to review every line before daring to merge it, and the time spent reviewing exceeds what it saved me. When a tool doesn’t inspire confidence, it’s no longer a question of cheap or expensive.
So my default now is qwen3.8 flash. Not because it’s especially strong, but because I don’t want to do DevOps for my supplier while I’m writing code.
From “Saint Liang” to “Holding a Grudge”
The community used to call Liang Wenfeng “Saint Liang”—and that was sincere: driving prices down and releasing open weights, those two things carried real weight in 2024, and I was one of the beneficiaries.
But saints aren’t allowed to make mistakes. Once you elevate someone to that position, every outage, every irrelevant answer becomes a tally. When the tallies pile up, “Saint Liang” becomes “liangzi”—a grudge. What changed was that character “saint.”
I don’t want to hold a grudge against anyone. Among domestic players, very few are willing to show their cards, and I still remember that goodwill. But remembering goodwill and using a product are two different things: who you use depends on whose work is reliably done.
In Closing
If you’re also being repeatedly educated by some API’s red banner, I suggest running through my sequence in reverse: check the status page first, then suspect your router, and finally switch your default model to the one that won’t turn red on you in the middle of the night.
As for me, I’m going to finish writing this, set qwen3.8 flash as my default, and then come back to see when it starts turning red on me too.
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