Doxxing and DDOSing are two separate things. Doxxing is exposing someone's personal information, such as home address, phone number, etc., often with the intent of targeted harassment against that person.

DDOS, which stands for distributed denial of service, is typically used, as you said, to bring down a website or other online service by flooding the server(s) with traffic until it cannot respond to any in a timely fashion, making the service inaccessible.

DDOSing is taking down a website, specifically by taking over a lot of other people's computers to all try to access the website at once until it gets overwhelmed.

Doxxing is different. It means finding someone's personal information (documents > docs > dox), such as their home address and phone number, and releasing it publicly.

Two separate concepts.

Doxxing is exposing someone's personal, potentially private, information publicly online.

DoS (denial of service) or DDoS (distributed denial of service) are methods of taking down websites. Generally they involve sending so many requests that the servers get overwhelmed.

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service.

Denial of Service is the concept of overwhelming a system (digital/computer or otherwise) with bogus usage, to the point that legitimate users can no longer access it. Imagine submitting thousands of FOIA requests to your local city government. Legally, they have to respond to them, even if it's to reject them as bogus. So, if anyone else submits one, it's just gonna get buried in the pile. Maybe they get to it, eventually, or maybe it actually just gets lost, or even accidentally thrown out when they decide to just throw away all the bogus ones.

Now, if you were to actuallly do this, your city government would probably just start binning all your requests, immediately, when they realize you're not submitting them in good faith. Hell, maybe they even get you banned from the building, for harassment. That's where "Distributed" comes into play. To combat this, what you'd do is get a whole bunch of your friends (you've got thousands of friends willing to waste time dealing with the government, right?) to each submit just one or two applications. They can no longer just throw them out based on the name of the submitter, they have to again spend more time inspecting each one, to see if it's legit, and then process it, if it is. MUCH tougher to defend against.

Doxxing is when someone reveals another person’s identifying information such as name, address, place of work etc. a DDos attack is an attack where you basically overload a websites server with so many requests it basically crashes