DeepSeek is the most popular app in the world right now but the AI chatbot is struggling to meet demand with reports of outages and errors from users around the globe.
It's no surprise to see DeepSeek is already down, considering it's the number one app on the App Store in the US and UK. The new ChatGPT competitor from a Chinese start-up has taken the world by storm thanks to its incredible reasoning power without any cost.
Unfortunately, it appears that DeepSeek has encountered malicious attacks as of Monday night in China and we're monitoring the situation to see what happens. Read on to stay up-to-date with all the latest DeepSeek outage information.
DeepSeek limits new users
Hello, TechRadar's Senior AI Writer John-Anthony Disotto here, and welcome to our DeepSeek liveblog.
DeepSeek, an AI chatbot from a Chinese start-up has exploded in popularity over the last few days and is now the most popular app in the US and UK App Store on iOS.
Following this overnight success, the AI tool has experienced issues with outages and reports of errors intermittently throughout the day.
At the time of writing, the latest status update on DeepSeek's website reads: "Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service. Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support."
Is DeepSeek even good?
There's a reason DeepSeek has seen worldwide success almost overnight, that's because it's a completely free-to-use app that has reasoning capabilities as good, if not better, than OpenAI's ChatGPT o1.
Earlier today I experimented with DeepSeek and pitted it against ChatGPT's reasoning model. You can read all about DeepSeek vs ChatGPT here.
What is DeepSeek?
If you want to know more about DeepSeek and everything it has to offer, we've got an excellent article titled "What is DeepSeek?"
There you'll find all the information you need on the new AI chatbot and everything it has to offer, including quick comparisons with ChatGPT.
Live updates on outage as they happen
DeepSeek appears to be working fine for me on my iPhone but I've noticed issues on my Google Pixel 8a. We're going to continue to update this live blog with updates throughout the day, so stay tuned to know more about what's going on with DeepSeek as it happens.
As it stands, the company is investigating the reported issues but "large-scale malicious attacks" definitely don't sound like something with an easy fix.
Hello there, Jacob Krol – Managing Editor News US – stepping in here for our live updates on the DeepSeek outage. The company has not provided any further updates since the last one regarding "large-scale malicious attacks," and as my colleague John-Anthony described, there's no telling how long those could take to fix.
DeepSeek's own status page still shows "Degraded Performance" for the website and the API. Further, if you're trying to sign up for the service – especially considering its still number one on the Apple App Store in the US and UK – you're still likely in limbo, waiting to get through that process.
While I am still waiting to start the process of creating an account – though I will try it with another sign-in method – my colleague and TechRadar's Editor-at-Large, Lance Ulanoff, got a little further.
He writes: "After trying unsuccessfully to sign up on the web, I downloaded the iOS app and selected Signup. There's a screen where you enter your email or phone number. I choose the former, set a password, and then hit the Send Code button. That triggers a challenge screen where you have to select the described object in an image (it's always the smallest [something]). After that, the system always says it successfully sent the code to your email. But it never arrives."
DeepSeek has yet to provide any further update beyond its original status page post, which you can see here.
Alongside the outage hitting DeepSeek and simultaneously pausing new registration, the AI company also has a family of new AI models all around images. DeepSeek claims its new multimodal AI models – available now on HuggingFace, a platform for AI development, can outpace OpenAI's Dall-E 3.
The lineup of models dubbed 'Janus-Pro' by DeepSeek can create and analyze images. It's clear that DeepSeek is looking to make a significant impact in the AI space, between an AI assistant and now with multi-modal capabilities. It remains to be seen when the outage will be resolved and what its exact cause is, though DeepSeek notes on its status page that it's due to "large-scale malicious attacks" on its services.
It's Graham Barlow here, the senior AI Editor on TechRadar. In the UK we're waking up to the unexpected impact of the Chinese AI startup has had on the tech industry, seemingly overnight, with tech stock falling significantly in value. It's safe to say that DeepSeek has disrupted the AI market and the perceived dominance of US tech companies in AI.
The DeepSeek development of its AI model only cost a fraction of the billions spent by US companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta, raising concerns about the need for such massive investments in AI.
The biggest loser in terms of stock so far seems to be Nvidia, which saw a massive $600 billion drop.
We'll have more news as the story develops.
It didn't take long for OpenAI's Sam Altman to weigh-in with a tweet about DeepSeek and how it's disrupted the AI industry by showing that comparable levels of AI development to ChatGPT can be achieved at a fraction of the cost.
Posting on X he said: "DeepSeek's R1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price. We will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases.
But mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research roadmap and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission. The world is going to want to use a LOT of AI, and really be quite amazed by the next gen models coming."
deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price.we will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.January 28, 2025
The Guardian has noted that DeepSeek provides answers to certain politically sensitive subjects that are very much in line with the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Most notably if you ask "What happened on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square?" you are told "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else", while asking if Taiwan is a country produces a very different results than you'd get from ChatGPT, for instance.
