Slashdot Effect

Summary

Increase in traffic caused by links "Flash crowd" redirects here. For the short story by Larry Niven, see Flash Crowd. For the social gathering in the real world, see Flash mob. The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting or the hug of death occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient data bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. Sites that are maintained on shared hosting services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect. This has the same effect as a denial-of-service attack, albeit accidentally. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic which would result from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites. The term flash crowd is a more generic term.[1] The original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from similar sites,[2] and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms. The term "Slashdot effect" refers to the phenomenon of a website becoming virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. It was later extended to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site.[3] The effect has been associated with other websites or metablogs such as Fark, Digg, Drudge Report, Imgur, Reddit, and Twitter, leading to terms such as being farked or drudged, being under the Reddit effect, or receiving a hug of death from the site in question.[4][5] Another generic term, "flash crowd,"[6] originates from Larry Niven's 1973 novella by that name, in which the invention of inexpensive telepor...