Chinese startup DeepSeek said on Monday it will temporarily limit registrations due to a cyberattack after the company’s AI assistant amassed sudden popularity, Reuters reported.
The startup earlier in the day was also hit by outages on its website after its AI assistant became the top-rated free application available on Apple’s App Store in the United States.
The company resolved issues relating to its application programming interface and users’ inability to log in to the website, according to its status page. The outages on Monday were the company’s longest in around 90 days and coincides with its sky-rocketing popularity.
DeepSeek last week launched a free assistant it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of incumbent players’ models, possibly marking a turning point in the level of investment needed for AI.
Powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, which its creators say “tops the leaderboard among open-source models and rivals the most advanced closed-source models globally”, the artificial intelligence application has surged in popularity among U.S. users since it was released on Jan. 10, according to the app data research Sensor Tower.
The Guardian reported: DeepSeek said its newly popular app was hit with a cyber-attack on Monday, which forced the Chinese company to temporarily limit registrations. The attack came after DeepSeek AI assistant app skyrocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store, becoming the highest rated free app in the US, and climbed high in Google’s Play Store.
On its status page, DeepSeek said it started to investigate the issue late Monday night in Beijing time. After about two hours of monitoring, the company said it was a victim a “large-scale malicious attack”. While Deep Seek limited registrations, existing users were still able to log on as usual. The app is now allowing registrations again.
DeepSeek’s app is an AI assistant similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The news of the app’s ascendency in the US – and ability to edge out American rivals for a fraction of the cost — sent technology stocks tumbling on Monday. Nvidia, the AI chip maker and most valuable US company, saw its stocks plummet by 13.6% in early trading, wiping out some $500bn in market capitalization.
ABC News reported: The emergence of China-based AI app DeepSeek sent shares plummeting on Monday for many U.S. tech giants, including chipmaker Nvidia and AI-backer Microsoft.
Nvidia, which helped catapult market wide gains in recent years, saw its share price plummet by more than 12% in early trading on Monday. Shares of Microsoft, a major stakeholder in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, fell about 4.5%
The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell more than 3% in early trading on Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 also inched downward.
In my opinion, it sounds like deepseek was having a problem functioning properly.