DeepSeek temporarily limited new sign-ups, citing 'large-scale malicious attacks'

• DeepSeek limited user registration on Monday amid service issues.
• The Chinese AI company cited recent "large-scale malicious attacks" for the temporary changes.
• The chatbot earlier encountered a "major outage," according to its status page.

DeepSeek limited sign-ups for its service as the popular Chinese AI app encountered a widespread outage on Monday morning.

DeepSeek said only users with a China-based phone number could register for a new account, a measure taken because it had recently faced "large-scale malicious attacks."

The chatbot, which dominated the AI conversation over the weekend, is currently the top free app on Apple's App Store.

"DeepSeek's online services have recently faced large-scale malicious attacks," the company said in a message on its website. "To ensure continued service, registration is temporarily limited to +86 phone numbers. Existing users can log in as usual."

However, later on Monday morning, the wording of the message changed to say that "registration may be busy" and Business Insider was able to successfully register for a new account with an email at the time.

The chatbot encountered widespread service issues on Monday morning, according to its status page, with both its API and web chat service experiencing what the company called a "major outage."

As of 11:40 a.m. in New York, the company's status page said its API was operating with "degraded performance" and its web chat service was experiencing a "partial outage."

The rollout of new models from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has garnered global attention for achieving a product that AI leaders and researchers describe as on par with OpenAI's ChatGPT, with apparently lower training costs.

Chinese hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng launched DeepSeek as a private company in 2023. The startup's latest release, a flagship AI model called DeepSeek-R1, was unveiled on January 20, the day Trump took office, and has since left many researchers astounded by its capabilities, especially in math, coding, and reasoning tasks.

Big Tech giants have poured billions into AI, investing in massive data centers and top-of-the-line chips to train increasingly intelligent large-language models with the goal of maintaining an edge in the AI arms race.

However, DeepSeek's development has suggested that China can rival top AI models in Silicon Valley — potentially at a fraction of the training costs amid US limits on access to American-made chips.

Nvidia, which has so far largely powered the AI revolution with its in-demand chips, saw its shares drop by over 14% on Monday — wiping out billions in market share — amid Wall Street concerns. Other tech companies have also seen their share price impacted.