There was an article on AOL yesterday, April 15th, that mentioned sugar gliders. The article linked to a web search of the term "sugar gliders" and this site was at the top of the list. The influx of people really made the site slow for everyone.
The incident was quite confusing at first. Checking the server logs revealed a lot of traffic coming from a very specific search on AOL's site. My first thought was that the referral information was faked, as it's easy to do and is strangely used as a form of spam. Thankfully the huge influx of traffic was legitimate. Unfortunately it messed up the site for everyone, including those new people that were here looking for information.
Here is a graph of outgoing traffic. It started at around 7PM central time. By midnight traffic had slowed down a bit. The plateau between 7 and 10 is due to 100% saturation of our outgoing bandwidth. Our internet connection just couldn't go any faster.