from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
flash crowd
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one
consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing
almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty
years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to
describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes
a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the server
may also be called {slashdot effect}). It has been pointed out that
the effect was anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's 1956 The
Stars My Destination.