TL;DR

  • ['DeepSeek restricts new signups due to widespread cyberattacks causing severe service disruptions.', "The surge in popularity, especially in the U.S., has overwhelmed the platform's infrastructure, leading to unprecedented downtime.", "While current users are unaffected, the company's recent measures aim to stabilize and protect against further attacks."]

The Chinese AI product DeepSeek is for the time being off-limits to new users outside of China as it grapples with the sudden rise in popularity.

What’s Going On? DeepSeek is grappling with unprecedented technical difficulties, as users rapidly swarm the app, catapulting it to the top of the U.S. iPhone charts.

The Chinese company reports “degraded performance” for its web and API services.

This strain will for the time being affect users’ ability to log in or register, as the platform has limited new registrations with phone numbers to only mainland China mobile numbers, a potential bottleneck in its international appeal.

This follows just as Deepseek users reported not being able to sign up and login on to its platform earlier in the day, a concern the company said has been resolved.

Unusual Downtime: These string of outages and issues reported since January 26 are in strong contrast to the usual near-perfect uptime for the DeepSeek services.

DeepSeek has already seen major outage for over 1 hour and 3 minutes and partial outage for an hour and 32 minutes — its highest ever reported, as checked by Dzambhala.

The rise in popularity for DeepSeek, based in Hangzhou, stems from its powerful DeepSeek-V3 and R1 reasoning models that are able to rival the benchmarks of OpenAI’s GPT series, including the O1 reasoning model.

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