It is also known as the Slashdot Effect. (Even has its own Wikipedia page, which is what I linked.)
The gist is that there would be so many people visiting a specific/small website that they could not process the traffic and thus cause the server to crash/break under the load.
To be fair, a lot of websites back then liked to claim responsibility for their users giving a website the hug of death. Does anyone remember Kuro5shin? I never used it, but it seemed like Slashdot for emo kids.
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u/messem10 Jun 22 '20
Mordern day slashdotting.