Not sure if this belongs here, but had the thought while trying the hit Stack Overflow during routine maintenance.
Does me hitting stackoverflow.com when its down cause issues on the servers? If so, how are they handled by the servers? Would sysadmins need to take any action?
If not, why? How are requests handled when the server is down?
I appreciate that this is a problem probably solved in the 90s, but I can't think of an appropriate google search for this question, and this seemed far more relevant a place for it than Stack Overflow. My gut feeling would be that a separate server handles the traffic.