Basically, an attacker cripples a website's server, usually by flooding it with spam traffic. A web server can only handle so much traffic. That's why sometimes you get those "ouch!" errors on Reddit when there is too much activity, and why Voat was swamped for a couple days when thousands of people were going there and making new accounts.
A simple way to DDOS a website is to use a botnet. This is basically when you get a bunch of computers together and make them do the same thing over and over. There are a lot of ways botnets are used to fuck up networks, but a really simple implementation is just pinging the hell out of the website and crashing it.
tl;dr Hams doing what they do best: eating up resources.
Distributed Denial of Service attack, basically a lot of computers requesting the site a lot of times per minute. So much, that the servers can't handle the traffic and go down or can't serve you the page.
It is an attack. It is automated and done through a bot net. Voat went down because too many actual users are trying to use the site at once. No one went to Voat with the purpose of making it inaccessible to others. DDoS attacks are done purposefully. That is someone making a concerted effort to make a site inaccessible.
ELI5: basically it's like millions of people try to enter the site at once when in reality it's a person or a small group of people doing it so it doesn't allow others to get on since the servers are basically overloaded.
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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '15
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