Just as DeepSeek was celebrating its meteoric rise to the top of Apple’s App Store charts, the Chinese AI chatbot hit an unexpected roadblock. The company reported experiencing “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services, forcing it to temporarily restrict new user registrations and causing major service disruptions.
Initially, DeepSeek limited new sign-ups to users with mainland China (+86) phone numbers in an attempt to control the situation. However, the company later softened this restriction, with their website simply stating that “registration may be busy” and encouraging users to try again if unsuccessful. Despite the limitations, some users have reported success in creating new accounts using Google and Apple ID sign-in options, as well as email registration.
The timing of this security hiccup is no coincidence, though. DeepSeek’s latest model, DeepSeek-R1 (which was launched on January 20), has been turning heads in the AI community for its impressive capabilities in math, coding, and reasoning tasks. AI researchers have suggested that its performance rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT but is achieved at significantly lower training costs—a development that’s caught the attention of Wall Street. The news coincided with a sharp 14% drop in Nvidia’s share price, impacting other tech companies as well.
Founded in 2023 by Chinese hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s rapid ascent suggests that China’s AI capabilities may be catching up to Silicon Valley’s, despite US restrictions on access to American-made chips.
While the service continues to experience some performance issues, with its API operating at reduced capacity and web chat service facing partial outages, existing users still maintain normal access to the platform.
Many AI enthusiasts on online forums have begun theorizing that Western companies with something to lose are behind the malicious attacks on DeepSeek. While this is an unfounded theory, there’s good reason to see why such a move would benefit big AI players in the US.
Nvidia just lost over $520 billion in market value in a single day, all because the AI community believes DeepSeek has found a fatal flaw in the over-reliance on large quantities of GPUs to power AI models. After all, Nvidia has built itself into a trillion-dollar company based on the mere fact that GPUs are the future for all businesses that are investing in AI.
It’s still too early to make any definitive statements on which direction AI progression will take, but if DeepSeek has found a way to get advanced models working for much less, you can bet it’s something worth getting maliciously attacked for.
