Denial of service

Denial of service is a condition during which a computer is not capable of providing its legitimate services.

Denial of service could be because of several reasons and it is sometimes a kind of attack, called denial of service attack when done intentionally to crash a computer system.

Common sources of denial of service:

• Defect software resulting in computer crash
• Limitations of the hardware of a computer system that limit its capabilities when providing necessary services
• Network-originated denial of service that is originated from excessive legitimate requests from other computers through a network or as an outcome of excessive service requests by sending random data by malicious parties to crash the related computer