Midjourney servers were aggressively hit at 12 AM this Saturday by an account linked to data collection engineers at Stability AI, leading to a 24-hour server outage for Midjourney users and a temporary ban on Stability AI employees using the software. The account was first flagged by Midjourney engineers late Saturday, Pirate Wires has discovered, when they noticed it was aggressively “trying to get all the prompts and images for every member inside the website.” These requests overwhelmed the company’s servers and took down part of its database for 24 hours. Upon banning the user and investigating further, Midjourney employees discovered the account “was linked by two credit cards to one of the main data collection engineers on the Stable Diffusion team [at Stability AI].” In response, the company has decided to ban all employees of Stability AI from using its software until further notice.

Midjourney and Stability AI are rivals in the generative AI space. Midjourney is a San Francisco-based company founded by David Holz, which has scaled to an estimated revenue of $200 million with fewer than 100 employees and no outside capital. Stability AI, a London-based company led by Emad Mostaque, has almost double the employees and raised $197 million from investors including Lightspeed, Coatue, and Intel, valuing the company at $1 billion. According to AIM Research, the company generated $44.2 million in revenue in 2023.

Data scraping — the process of extracting information from the output generated by another program, usually for the purposes of training one’s own model — has become a fairly standard practice in the race to develop AI tools, though it has occasionally led to lawsuits from companies (such as X) which allege the practice adversely affects user experience and strains servers. But knocking a company’s servers offline for any amount of time, as Stability AI employees did to Midjourney on Saturday, appears to be a unique, if inadvertent, escalation in the battle for AI dominance.

- Sanjana Friedman and Mike Solana