Apparently the University of Wisconsin and Netgear have a problem. It looks like Netgear hard coded the SNTP IP address into some embedded devices for network time sync and now the school gets the pleasure of servicing a few hundred thousand requests per second. You can read about it here.
Wow...seems to me the moral of this story is twofold.
#1 - don't ship a product that beats the crap out of someone else's server.
#2 - don't ship 700,000 units of your product until you're pretty sure you've taken care of #1.