Slashdot was Down!

April 30th, 2008

Thousands of Slashdot visitors were in for a surprise when Slashdot, the top technology starting point of many was ‘not connecting’. Slashdot is famous for the Slashdot effect which crashes servers and makes smaller sites unavailable when they are featured in a Slashdot story.

The last time I remember Slashdot halted was when they logged 16,777,216 Comments and hit a MySQL posting bug which no one thought anyone could achieve. Netcraft confirmed this outage and slashdot is moving to a new network and hardware soon

All of Netcraft’s globally distributed performance monitors have recorded a solid period of downtime at a number of sites hosted in the VA Software netblock. VA Software is the former name of SourceForge, Inc, which hosts all of the affected sites, including Slashdot, the source code repository SourceForge.net, software release site Freshmeat and merchandise supplier ThinkGeek.

Another popular site for monitoring uptime of websites and servers, Pingdom confirmed that Slashdot was unavailable for around 5 hours from 09:38 CET (03:38 US EST) till 14:48 CET (08:48 US EST).

Top sites like Slashdot take pride in their hosting uptime and are envied by shared hosting users whose sites crash with the simple traffic spikes. No wonder Yahoo! Buzz will not accept like ours, as most sites cannot survive huge traffic.

Long before Digg effect, webmasters prayed to get slashdotted and strategies were devised to survive slashdotting. Last year Slashdot celebrated 10th years and launched Slashdot Firehose, a collaborative system designed to allow users to assist editors in the story selection process.

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