On October 16, Tencent's Public Relations Director Zhang Jun announced on Weibo that WorkBuddy has officially released a statement titled "Explanation and Compensation Announcement for DeepSeek Model Service Disruptions". In response to the previous disruptions in the DeepSeek model service, WorkBuddy will refund affected users for the points consumed while using DeepSeek from October 8 to 14; additionally, all users of the domestic version of WorkBuddy will receive an extra 500 points each.
The compensation from Tencent's WorkBuddy stems from a significant disruption in the DeepSeek model service on October 15. The announcement indicated that from 8:11 to 13:04 on October 15, the DeepSeek service experienced a failure, rendering the DeepSeek model unusable within the WorkBuddy platform and affecting the experience of some users. It is reported that this service interruption lasted for 4 hours and 52 minutes.
During the outage, the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash option in the WorkBuddy model list was grayed out and could not be selected. The system prompted, "Service error, please switch models and try again." WorkBuddy also indicated, "DeepSeek factory service is down," and advised users to switch to other models.
Compensation Plan 1: Full refund of points for affected users, credited within 7 working days. For users who were affected while using the DeepSeek model on the domestic version of WorkBuddy, the points consumed from October 8 to 14 will be fully refunded, credited within 7 working days. Individual users can check the refund results on the points detail page, while enterprise users can view it on the enterprise management portal.
Compensation Plan 2: An additional 500 points will be given to all users, which must be manually claimed before October 22. In consideration of the negative impact this incident had on user experience, WorkBuddy will grant an additional 500 points to all users of the domestic version. Users can manually claim these points on the WorkBuddy "Usage Management" page before 24:00 on October 22, with the points valid for one month.
It should be noted that WorkBuddy free version users receive a base of 500 points each month, which are automatically credited on the 1st of each month. The additional 500 points being offered are equivalent to the monthly base points but must be actively claimed by users and will not be credited automatically.