Month: January 2025

After initial reports of a magnitude of 4.1. – and then 3.9 – earthquake striking the area, it was later confirmed that a 3.8 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of New England on Monday morning. A USGS map showing that the shaking was felt in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and an hour away in Boston, MA. The U.S. Geological Survey wrote on X  “today’s M3.8 near Bar Harbor, Main, reminds us that earthquakes are unusual but not unheard of along the Atlantic Seaboard. If you felt it, or are in the area and didn’t feel it, please let us know!”

According to the United States Geological Survey, the earthquake was 10 kilometers southeast of York Harbor, Maine, occurring at 10:22 a.m. According to local police, homes and businesses in Concord, Massachusetts, reporting feeling the quake. The depth of the earthquake was more than eight miles underground, according to the USGS.  There was no tsunami threat to New England, per the U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center.

John Ebel, a senior scientist with the Weston Observatory at Boston College, told WBZ-TV: “This is like a once-in-every-five-years kind of earthquake. We don’t sit on any active fault lines. But again for our area [it] is really significant.”

The event on Monday was the strongest earthquake measured in the northeastern United States since April, when a 4.8-magnitude earthquake struck near Lebanon, New Jersey. According to USGS records, that shaking was the most intense in the Northeast in more than a decade.

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Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek said on Monday that its new, popular app was hit with a cyber-attack, forcing the company to temporarily limit registrations. The attack came after the DeepSeek AI assistant app skyrocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store, taking over rival OpenAI’s coveted spot as the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. on Apple’s App Store, dethroning ChatGPT for DeepSeek’s own AI Assistant.

DeepSeek said on its status page that it started to investigate the issue late Monday night Beijing time; after two hours of monitoring, the company said it was the victim of a “large-scale malicious attack”. While DeekSeek limited registrations, existing users were still able to log on as usual. The app is now allowing registrations again; the status page reads: “DeepSeek-R1 is now live.”

DeepSeek has generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks as a fast-growing rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and other leading AI tools.  Its quick rise on Monday sent technology stocks tumbling; Nvidia, the AI chip maker and most valuable US company, saw its stocks plummet by 13.6% in early trading.

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