[apothegm]

The number of users required depends on the website, what hardware it’s running on, what scaling it has in place, and what caching it has in place.

It’s called a DDOS — distributed denial of service.

It sometimes even happens inadvertently. Way back when, a server unintentionally brought to its knees by excessive traffic was said to have been “slashdotted”, after a then-popular tech site. Hitting the front page of HN or Reddit has had that effect on some sites too. It used to be more common before cloud hosting became ubiquitous — when auto-scaling apps was harder (or even essentially impossible) to implement and static-ish sites weren’t effectively hosted on CDNs.

[micio-micio]

I wonder if something like this could work as a form of protest. Like a DDOS attack through real traffic from protesters?

[apothegm]

Against a small-time operator or one with a very outdated approach to hosting, maybe. Most decent sized sites now have DDOS protections and manual scaling if not auto-scaling. And these days human traffic at many sites pales in relation to bot traffic.