Wikimedia says OpenAI-like bots may have crashed its data search

Wikimedia Foundation said automated software appearing to come from OpenAI made millions of requests for data and visited millions of pages, mostly on Wikidata and Commons, its shared facts database and media library. It also sent hundreds of thousands of complex searches, a burden that may have helped cause the May 2026 search outage recorded as the 2026-05-13 wdqs incident.