Midjourney says it has banned Stability ai staff from using its service, accusing employees of the rival generative ai company of causing a systems outage earlier this month during an attempt to delete Midjourney's data.
Midjourney posted an update to its Discord server on March 2 that acknowledged that a prolonged server outage was preventing generated images from appearing in users' galleries. In a summary of a business update call on March 6, Midjourney stated that “paid accounts botnet-like activity,” which the company specifically links to Stability ai employees, was behind the outage.
According to Midjourney user Nick St. Pierre in X, which heard the call, Midjourney said the service was interrupted because “someone from Stability ai was trying to capture all the message and image pairs in the middle of the night on Saturday.” St. Pierre said Midjourney had linked several paid accounts to an individual on Stability ai's data team.
In its summary of the call for business update on March 6 (which Midjourney refers to as “office hours”), the company says it is prohibiting all Stability ai employees will use its service “indefinitely” in response to the outage. Midjourney is also introducing a new policy that will similarly prohibit employees of any company from engaging in “aggressive automation” or causing service disruptions.
Saint Peter pointed out the accusations to Stability ai CEO Emad Mostaque, who responded in X, saying that he was investigating the situation and that Stability had not ordered the actions in question. “It's very confusing how 2 accounts would work. This team hasn't been ruling out either, as we've been using synthetic and other data, given that SD3 outperforms all other models,” Mostaque said, referring to the Stable Diffusion 3 ai model . ai/news/stable-diffusion-3″>currently in preview. He stated that if the cut was caused by a Stability employee, then it was involuntary and “obviously not a DDoS attack.”
Midjourney founder David Holz responded to Mostaque in the same thread, claiming to have sent him “some information” to help him with his internal investigation.
Otherwise, the situation is still developing and no additional updates have been provided since that March 6 conversation. At the time of writing, neither Midjourney nor Stability ai have responded to the request. EdgeRequest for comments.
