AI newcomer, DeepSeek, has been hit with a cyberattack that left services performing at reduced capacity.
What happened?
After topping the charts this week, DeepSeek, found itself the target of a large-scale cyberattack that disrupted its service and caused outages. In response, the Chinese company has put out a statement informing customers about the reduced performance and assured users, no data has been breached.
As a temporary fix, DeepSeek has also limited the number of registrations that the app is taking. Existing users can continue to access the app, albeit with a performance downgrade.
Was this a motivated attack?
Heralded as a breakthrough in AI development, DeepSeek has positioned itself as a worthy competitor to the widely popular ChatGPT. Boasting a performance that’s on par with OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 at a fraction of the cost and with little access to the advanced chips that western tech companies are working with.
Geopolitical and industry implications
With the launch of R1 inadvertently fanning the flames of the AI feud between the U.S. and China, many have speculated that the attack might have been politically motivated. No one knows for sure, but one thing is for certain—the battle for AI supremacy is heating up.