Midjourney has accused the recent 24-hour service interruption of being caused by "zombie network-like activities" initiated by two accounts associated with Stable Diffusion creators. Midjourney posted an update on its Discord server on March 2, acknowledging that the prolonged server outage resulted in the inability to display generated images in users' galleries. In a summary of the business update conference call on March 6, Midjourney claimed that the cause of the interruption was "zombie network-like activities" from paid accounts, specifically pointing out the involvement of Stability AI employees. According to Nick St. Pierre, a Midjourney user who participated in the conference call, Midjourney stated that the service interruption occurred because "someone from Stability AI attempted to scrape all prompts and image pairs on Saturday night." St. Pierre mentioned that Midjourney had linked multiple paid accounts to a member of Stability AI's data team. In the summary of the business update conference call on March 6, referred to as "office hours" by Midjourney, the company announced an indefinite ban on all Stability AI employees from using its services in response to the interruption. Midjourney also introduced a new policy that would similarly prohibit any company employee engaging in "aggressive automation" or causing service disruptions from using its services. St. Pierre raised these allegations to Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI, who responded on X, stating that he is investigating the situation and that Stability AI did not order any related actions. "It is very confusing that two accounts would engage in such behavior. Additionally, our team did not perform any scraping as we have been using synthetic data and other data, and SD3 has outperformed all other models," said Mostaque, referring to the Stable Diffusion 3 AI model currently in preview. He claimed that if the service interruption was caused by Stability AI employees, it was unintentional and "clearly not a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS)." David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, replied to Mostaque, stating that he had sent him "some information" to assist with the internal investigation. It seems strange that the scraping activities of only two accounts would result in such a prolonged server outage. The irony of the situation has also garnered widespread attention from online creators who have criticized both companies (as well as generative AI systems) for scraping large amounts of online data from their works without consent. Stable Diffusion and Midjourney have faced multiple copyright lawsuits, with the latter being accused of creating an artist database for training purposes in December last year.