DeepSeek offers for free/extremely cheap, a very expensive to provide service, requiring huge server infrastructure, to a userbase that probably grew by 3+ orders of magnitude in the last week.
There's no way they weren't going to be forced to throttle user signups, "cyberattack" or not.
To be fair, I recently posted a prolonged Anthropic complete API outage (when Sonnet 3.5 was best in town) and it got zero traction, so it's not unimaginable.
There's no way they weren't going to be forced to throttle user signups, "cyberattack" or not.