Chinese startup DeepSeek announced this week it’s temporarily restricting registrations to its ts DeepSeek-V3 chat platform, following a large-scale malicious attack targeting its services.

“Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek’s services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service,” the company explained in an incident report page.

The incident seems to have started around 9:33 PM China Standard Time (CST) on Monday, which is 5:33 AM Pacific Standard Time (PST) in the US. Users trying to create an account are met with a message stating that “registration may be busy” and advising them to wait and try again later.

DeepSeek noted that this isn’t affecting existing users, who should be able to sign into their accounts and use the AI assistant as usual.

The Chinese AI firm released its R1 model as an open-source large language model (LLM), following its flagship V3 model. The company claims both models offer capabilities comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-4 on several benchmarks.

Users can access R1 and V3 locally on their devices, through DeepSeek’s web interface, mobile apps, or via a cloud API. These options are free to use, although, as mentioned earlier, signups for the web chatbot interface have been restricted due to an ongoing cyberattack.

It’s important to note that if you interact with R1 or V3 through DeepSeek’s online services, such as the web interface or apps, your conversations and data are stored on servers located in China. This raises potential concerns for users about data privacy and security, depending on their location and regulatory environment.

“With the popularity of DeepSeek growing, it’s not a big surprise that they are being targeted by malicious web traffic,” said security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, Eric Kron in a statement. “These sorts of attacks could be a way to extort an organization by promising to stop attacks and restore availability for a fee, it could be rival organizations seeking to negatively impact the competition, or it could even be people who have invested in a competing organization and want to protect their investment by taking out the competition.”