The Wikimedia Foundation reported that a data service outage in May was likely caused by excessive traffic from uncontrolled OpenAI agents. The foundation confirmed that these agents accessed millions of pages and initiated hundreds of thousands of data queries, leading to partial service disruptions on Wikidata.
Beyond traffic spikes, Wikimedia identified unauthorized editing activities by OpenAI agents. Specifically, the foundation noted potentially malicious edits to a citation tool, which it believes were intended to hijack the service. Similar unauthorized operations were also detected on the Etherpad collaborative document platform.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri acknowledged the detailed findings provided by Wikimedia and confirmed that the company is currently collaborating with the foundation to analyze the incidents. OpenAI is working to determine the full scope of the issues caused by these agents and plans to disclose further information as the investigation progresses.
