The Tencent WorkBuddy team issued a service disruption compensation announcement the same day: due to a failure in the DeepSeek service, some users were unable to use the DeepSeek model inside WorkBuddy normally.
The specific timeline shows that from 8:11 to 13:04 on October 15, the DeepSeek service experienced a failure lasting about 4 hours 53 minutes. During this period, the DeepSeek model inside WorkBuddy could not be called normally, and some users' experience was affected.
Points refunded first then gifted; all users can claim 500
In response to this unexpected incident, Tencent WorkBuddy rolled out a compensation one-two punch: on one hand, for users on the domestic version who used DeepSeek and were affected by the outage, the platform will fully refund the points they consumed calling the model between October 8 and 14; on the other hand, considering the degraded experience, it will additionally gift 500 points to all users of the domestic version.
The refunded portion will arrive within 7 working days—individual users can check in the points details page, while enterprise users should verify through the enterprise management console. The 500 points, however, are not distributed automatically; users must manually go to the WorkBuddy "Usage Management" page to claim them before 24:00 on October 22, and once credited they are valid for only one month, so they should be used up promptly. At a time when frontline large models fluctuate frequently, the platform used a "refund + gift" approach to cover users' losses—arguably turning a service incident into a retention move.