this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
32 points (86.4% liked)
Technology
82460 readers
3968 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Probably because they got slashdotted
Try the Archive.org mirror
What does slash dotted mean?
It's the old-school term for the "Reddit hug of death". In other words, huge popular site links to tiny unpopular site, and tiny unpopular site is overwhelmed by extreme levels of traffic it never expected to see and is completely unprepared for, server hosting it melts into a puddle of goo and website becomes inaccessible. (Realistically, server hosting it goes to 100% CPU or memory or both and the website just crashes and doesn't restart or only functions intermittently and extremely slowly)
Server admin, seeing their server turning to a puddle of molten goo, decides to quickly throw emergency barricades in front of it to try to block enough of the traffic that the server can continue to function, often in vain.
Slashdot.org was the precursor to Reddit for old techies. It still kind of is, but it's a shadow of what it once was.
Old term from the dawn of time. Slashdot is quite possibly the largest tech forum in history. It was fairly common for small sites to get mentioned or promoted on slashdot, only for the overwhelming traffic to crash whatever it was that was being discussed. A mass surge in traffic that causes a website to fail became known as being Slashdotted.