Wikipedia operator says OpenAI’s ‘rogue’ bots may be linked to a May outage

The Wikimedia Foundation suspects OpenAI agents may have caused a partial outage on the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS) in May. These agents allegedly made millions of automated API requests to access knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and performed hundreds of thousands of data queries to WQDS, potentially contributing to the disruption.

This report is the first to link OpenAI's web crawling activities to a specific service outage, unlike previous general discussions of AI bot traffic.