Slashdot Effect

The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that would result from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites, although the name is dated since flash crowds from Slashdot have been reported in 2005 as diminishing beginning in 2004 due to competition from similar sites. The effect has been associated with other websites or metablogs such as Fark, Digg, Drudge Report, Reddit, and Twitter, leading to terms such as being Farked or Drudged, or being under the Reddit effect. Google Doodles, which link to search results on the doodle topic, also result in high increases of traffic from the search results page. 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.

A flash crowd is a more generic term without using any specific name that describes a network phenomenon where a network or host suddenly receives a lot of traffic. This is sometimes due to the appearance of a web site on a blog or news column.