The geek news portal Slashdot was offline this morning, along with the other sites in the Open Source Technology Group. The site is daily reading for computing and technology enthusiasts, and is widely followed by journalists tracking the IT industry.

A dynamically updating chart of Slashdot's uptime is available here.

Slashdot is famous for the Slashdot effect, in which sites crash under overwhelming traffic after they are mentioned on the site. There is apparently no truth to rumors that the outage was caused by a "reverse Slashdot effect" driven by traffic from links on Roland Piquepaille's web site.

OSTG's web sites average 9 million page views daily, and had more than 50 million unique vistors in the fourth quarter of 2004.