slashdot effect

n.

1. Also spelled “/. effect”; what is said to have happened when 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. The term is quite widely used by /. readers, including variants like “That site has been slashdotted again!”

2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site. This would better be described as a flash crowd. Differs from a DoS attack in being unintentional.