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DeepSeek sees partial restoration of services after massive DDoS attack

DeepSeek

The DeepSeek app and web chat have been partially restored after a multi-day outage, according to the company's status page. While users can now engage with the V3 and DeepThink (R1) models freely again now, the web search remains disabled for the time being.

After it exploded in popularity over the weekend, DeepSeek said that its chat service has come under a malicious DDoS attack from an unnamed source. The quick number of sign-ups to the service wouldn't have been helping the servers very much either.

After days of very poor performance, it now seems like users can chat to the models with decent reliability. Unfortunately, the experience is still degraded with web search currently disabled. Hopefully, this will get sorted in short time so that users can continue accessing the service again.

The Status Page shows the status of the API service and the web chat service. As of Thursday, there have been no reported issues with the web chat service, according to the status page, but the API is still experiencing a major outage.

DeepSeek's reasoning model, R1, is revolutionary because it dramatically lowers the costs of using reasoning models. It is also open source, which means other companies and individuals can take it to build on or run locally.

Critics have pointed out rightly that the chat service self-censors when you try to ask it about touchy subjects related to China such as Taiwan, Xinjiang, human rights, and other territorial disputes the country has with its neighbors. Nevertheless, it's one of the few ways out there for users to get unlimited access to a reasoning model which has up-to-date information from the web - even customers paying OpenAI do not get unlimited access.

To help fend off the DDoS attack, DeepSeek is now controlling access to its website with Cloudflare which prevents attackers from taking down the website. Hopefully, it can sort out the web search access soon so that users can experience this powerful tool, following all the media coverage of it.

Image via Depositphotos.com

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