this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Probably because they got slashdotted
Try the Archive.org mirror
What does slash dotted mean?
It means I just crumbled into dust.
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.