DeepSeek suspends new registrations amid cyberattack

China’s DeepSeek, which shook up US AI companies with the debut of its R1 model family, has limited new signups due to ongoing cyberattack.

“Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service,” the company said in a post to its status page. “Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support.”

The incident appears to have begun around 21:33 CST on Monday, January 27, or around 07:33 PST and was ongoing at the time this article was filed.

DeekSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company’s AI app for iOS, DeepSeek – AI Assistant, is presently the top free download in Apple’s US App store, just above OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The Chinese AI firm released DeepSeek-R1 as an open source model last month, claiming reasoning capabilities that rival OpenAI’s GPT-o1 in a number of benchmarks.

Having allegedly done so at just $5.58 million, significantly less than Western AI firms, investors in companies like Nvidia have begun to wonder whether they need to revise their financial assumptions. The result has been a selloff in AI stocks.

The viability of open source models has long been a concern among commercial AI firms with proprietary models. AI skeptics like Gary Marcus have previously questioned the valuation of firms like OpenAI when companies like Meta have been giving away open source models at no charge.

We will update this story as it develops. ®