hug of death

plural hugs of death

1. InternetAn extreme spike in usage of an Internet service that causes an outage of said service.

   1 more example

   But the law of trespass to chattels embeds good intuitions about balancing one person's ownership with another's casual interaction. It is fine if you pet my dog, just don't pet him so much that his hair falls off! It's fine if you link my content, just don't give my server the Internet hug of death.⁴²

   2021 February 25, Joshua A. T. Fairfield, Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up?, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 59

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see hug, of, death.