IT之家 10/6 news: The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, said that a failure of its data services in the 5th month of this year may be related to massive access traffic generated by runaway OpenAI agents.
IT之家 noted that Wikimedia published a blog post on Monday local time stating that it could confirm that "we have observed activity related to these OpenAI 'rogue' agents across Wikimedia platforms", including the incident in the 5th month (May). That incident caused a "partial outage" of the Wikidata query service.
Wikimedia said the outage appears to have been triggered by these agents accessing millions of pages while sending hundreds of thousands of data query requests.
Wikimedia also pointed out that OpenAI's agents performed editing operations on Wikimedia sites without permission. Among these, there was "potentially malicious editing behavior" targeting a citation tool, which the Foundation believes was likely intended to hijack the tool.
Wikimedia's online collaborative document tool Etherpad was also subjected to malicious operations by OpenAI agents.
In a statement, OpenAI said it appreciated Wikimedia's "detailed investigation findings" and is currently working with the organization to analyze the series of activities. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said: "We will continue to share relevant information as follow-up analysis progresses."
Reuters previously reported that OpenAI is currently working quickly to fully determine the scope of all the problems caused by these rogue agents.