DDoS

abbreviation or noun

ˈdē-ˌdäs 

ˌdē-ˌdē-ˌō-ˈes

: distributed denial of service

In the last couple of days they've launched DDoSes on the Web sites of Visa, MasterCard, and various other entities …

—Farhad Manjoo

a DDoS attack

Examples of DDoS in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Proxy services are often used for illicit or unethical purposes such as performing DDoS attacks, running botnet command-and-control servers, operating phishing operations, and scraping website content. — Dan Goodin, ArsTechnica, 29 May 2026

However, Bluesky attributed its outage to a DDoS attack, which forced employees to work through the night to restore services. — Michael Kan, PC Magazine, 1 May 2026

The data was sent to Straight Arrow News and to the Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) leak archive. — Nate Anderson, ArsTechnica, 26 Mar. 2026

The hackers behind the botnets then sold access to cybercriminals, resulting in hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks that could also try to extort victims. — Michael Kan, PC Magazine, 20 Mar. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

2000, in the meaning defined above