The Chinese AI platform DeepSeek has disabled registrations on its DeepSeek-V3 chat platform due to an ongoing "large-scale" cyber-attack targeting its services.

A Chinese-developed AI model, DeepSeek presents itself as a machine learning platform that prioritises operational efficiency, has caught the attention of government.

However according to Bleeping Computer, the attack - suspected to be a DDoS - forced the company to turn off new registrations. "Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service," reads a message on the DeepSeek status page.

"Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support."

Commenting, Dr. Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at ImmuniWeb, said it is not completely excluded that DeepSeek simply could not handle the legitimate user traffic due to insufficiently scalable IT infrastructure, while presenting this unforeseen IT outage as a cyber-attack.

“A formal investigation report by DeepSeek will likely bring clarity about the incident. Most importantly, this incident indicates that while many corporations and investors are obsessed with the ballooning AI hype, we still fail to address foundational cybersecurity issues despite having access to allegedly super-powerful GenAI technologies. An overall disappointment in GenAI technologies is possible in 2025.”

Competitor

According to SC US, DeepSeek is intended as a competitor to ChatGPT and claims to be able to run with a fraction of the computing power used by other machine learning models.

“Through [reinforcement learning], DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerges with numerous powerful and intriguing reasoning behaviors. However, it encounters challenges such as poor readability, and language mixing,” developers  wrote.

“To address these issues and further enhance reasoning performance, we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates multi-stage training and cold-start data before RL.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration took notice of the news out of China, calling it "a wake-up call to the American AI industry."

Dan Raywood Senior Editor SC Media UK

Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with more than 20 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 16 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.

He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Conference, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and ESET Security Days.

Outside work, Dan enjoys supporting Tottenham Hotspur, managing mischievous cats, and sampling craft beers.