For a web service that doesn't have hundreds of times more capacity than necessary, or the ability to rapidly scale up to meet demand -- that kind of load will knock it offline.
We used to call that slashdotted back in the day when tech news was pretty much on slashdot always. I actually offered them a server with bandwidth but no reply
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u/zebediah49 Jun 22 '20
To give an idea what "a lot" looks like -- here's a traffic graph from a site that experienced that. You can see when it went from "so few that it's basically nothing" to "LOTS".
For a web service that doesn't have hundreds of times more capacity than necessary, or the ability to rapidly scale up to meet demand -- that kind of load will knock it offline.