Whenever a smaller website gets slashdotted, it suffers from the slashdot effect. Rather quickly after a smaller site was slashdotted, it simply goes down. Either with no message at all, or with a 503 (Service Unavailable) or a 404 (not found) message.

It is therefore quite amusing to see a 503 message from slashdot itself:

To be fair, the main slashdot site was online. Only the part of the site that handles a user’s profile was down.