Slashdot Slashdotted Itself

Caleb Brown

Well it seems the almighty Slashdot is itself vulnerable to Slashdotting.

We noticed it was returning a 500 Internal Service Error around lunchtime today and the noise on twitter confirmed others were seeing the same thing.

According to the chief network engineer Slashdot went down due to an massive amounts of traffic on their internal network, about 40 Gbit/sec across their core switches.

Service was restored after the problem switch was isolated, however the origin of the cause is yet to be identified.

Slashdot is a popular tech news website from which the term 'Slashdot Effect' was coined - where their thousands of readers all follow the same link in at once, bringing that site to it's knees.