Slashdot website down

Suffering from the self-Slashdot effect?

Updated: Linux lovers' favourite website Slashdot.org has been unavailable all morning.

Sister sites SourceForge and Freshmeat are also down. Attempts to visit the site are met with a "taking too long to respond" message.

Slashdot was formerly famous for the "Slashdot effect" or slashdotting - when links from the site to smaller websites caused them to crash because of the unexpected huge number of visitors.

A spokesman for Pingdom which monitors website uptime said: "They've been unavailable since 09:38 Central European Time (it's 13:23 now, so that's close to 4 hours)." He added that neither servers in the US or Europe were able to access the site, suggesting their network is down.

Update: Slashdot came back at 14.48 CET, a downtime of just over five hours.®