{{Redirect|Flash crowd|the short story by Larry Niven|Flash Crowd|the social gathering in the real world|flash mob}}
The '''Slashdot effect''', also known as '''slashdotting''', or the '''hug of death''' occurs when a popular [[website]] links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This [[Web traffic#Traffic overload|overloads]] the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. 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]], [[Server (computing)|servers]] that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic [[Disk quota|quota]]s. Sites that are maintained on [[shared hosting]] services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect. 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 term '''flash crowd''' is a more generic term.<ref>{{cite web |first1= Ismail |last1=Ari |first2=Bo |last2=Hong |first3=Ethan L. |last3=Miller |first4=Scott A. |last4=Brandt |first5=Darrell D. E. |last5=Long | url = http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/ari-mascots03.pdf | title = Managing Flash Crowds on the Internet | publisher = University of California Santa Cruz Storage Systems Research Center | date = October 2003 | access-date = 15 March 2010 | archive-date = 9 May 2013 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130509180859/http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/ari-mascots03.pdf | url-status = dead }}</ref>
The original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from ''Slashdot'' were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from [[News aggregator|similar sites]],<ref name="BW Less impact"/> and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms.
