DeepSeek temporarily limited new registrations to China phone numbers, citing 'large-scale malicious attacks'

• DeepSeek limited who can register for a new account on Monday.
• The Chinese AI company cited recent "large-scale malicious attacks" for the temporary registration limits.
• The chatbot encountered service issues, according to its status page.

DeepSeek limited who could sign up for its service as the popular Chinese AI app encountered widespread outages on Monday morning.

DeepSeek said only users with a China-based phone number could register for a new account, a measure taken because it had recently faced "large-scale malicious attacks."

The app is currently the top free app on Apple's App Store.

"DeepSeek's online services have recently faced large-scale malicious attacks," the company said in a message on its website. "To ensure continued service, registration is temporarily limited to +86 phone numbers. Existing users can log in as usual."

However, later on Monday morning, the wording of the message changed to say that "registration may be busy" and Business Insider was able to successfully register for a new account with an email at the time.

The chatbot was encountering issues on Monday morning, according to its status page. Both the API and web chat service experienced what the company called a "major outage." As of 11:40 a.m. in New York, the company's status page said its API was operating with "degraded performance" and its web chat service was experiencing a "partial outage."

The rollout of new models from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has garnered global attention for offering a product AI leaders and researchers describe as just as good, if not better, than OpenAI's lineup, with apparently lower training and operating costs.

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