Gone are the days when you got a polite phone call before your company website was to be featured by a major news outlet, giving you a chance to be ready for the crush.
Since the 90s, being slashdotted is now common vernacular among webmasters. Normally seen as a good thing (because of the publicity), it still blasts you off the ‘Net for a while, and most of those denied web visitors will never come back.
Though it was slashdot.org that bestowed the phenomenon a name, it gave rise to a whole new class of potential web traffic hurricanes, with the potential to blow you, literally, off the map for a while. No… not DDOS attacks, but about the same effect…. when a massively popular weblog such as, oh, Dooce (a popular, pithy, utah-based “usta-be-mormon” blog) directs her thousands of web-bound visitors to an unsuspecting website, like the BYU Student Honor Association’s posters on Modesty, high traffic loads are bound to happen.
At the time of this posting, the server sha.byu.edu is still offline. I wonder if they know even where this traffic is coming from?
Interestingly, Dooce, which lost her job thanks to blogging is now somewhat returning the favor by DOOCING servers off the web one-by-one.
Power to the People.
Popularity: 8% [?]
