Word.ws English Dictionary

hug of death

hug of death noun: an extreme spike in usage of an Internet service that causes an outage of said service.

Noun

hug of death (plural hugs of death)

  1. (Internet) An extreme spike in usage of an Internet service that causes an outage of said service.
    • 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...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.

Forms of hug of death

pluralhugs of death

Questions about hug of death

What does hug of death mean?
Hug of death means an extreme spike in usage of an Internet service that causes an outage of said service.
What part of speech is hug of death?
Hug of death is a noun.
What is the plural of hug of death?
The plural of hug of death is hugs of death.

Words near hug of death in the dictionary

  1. hug buttons
  2. hug drug
  3. hug it out
  4. hug machine
  5. hug machines
  6. hug of death
  7. hug oneself
  8. hug-a-hoodie
  9. hug-box
  10. hug-boxes
  11. hug-me-tight

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hug of death (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-hug of death.wav.

Cite this entry: “hug of death.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hug_of_death. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.