Slashdot

[Raeanne Dimick]

Press releases can often trigger increased interest in a certain topic, and if a Web site link is provided in the release, this can translate to increased hits to the Web site. If the increase in traffic is so dramatic that it causes the server to be completely unreachable, the server is said to have been slashdotted. The name came into being after October, 1998, when a press release was published on the Slashdot.org Web site, resulting in a major surge in traffic to another Web server, causing it to go down. You can also use the term as a verb, as in, Dude, thanks to that stupid article, our server got slashdotted today, man!