DeepSeek’s top-ranked AI app is restricting sign-ups due to ‘malicious attacks’

After surging to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in the US, DeepSeek’s AI Assistant is now restricting new user sign-ups. According to an incident report page, registrations are being temporarily limited “due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services,” though it’s unclear how these limitations are being applied.

“Existing users can log in as usual,” DeepSeek said in its update. “Thanks for your understanding and support.” An alert banner on the DeepSeek web sign-up page says that “registration may be busy,” rather than entirely restricted, however, and encourages users to wait and “try again” if their application is unsuccessful.

Outages and performance issues were reported by DeepSeek earlier today, which prevented users from signing in or creating new accounts. That incident has now been marked as resolved, but no information has been provided about the reported attacks against DeepSeek’s chatbot app. It was previously thought that DeepSeek’s systems may be under strain due to a huge influx of new users downloading the app, which is said to rival Western AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropics Claude.

An earlier update said that “only registration with a mainland China mobile phone number” is currently supported in an attempt to “ensure continued service.” The specific requirement for Chinese numbers has since been deleted; however, I and other Verge staff have been able to successfully create new accounts via sign-in options for Google and Apple ID. Email registration is also still currently listed as available on the web-based DeepSeek signup page.