The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, 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. 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 original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from similar sites, and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms. 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. 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.
