Denial-of-service (DoS) attack is an attack against a system aiming to cause it to stop providing a service — a flood of bogus requests made to the system causes its overload, making it unable to handle requests from legitimate users.
Being cheap to implement and efficient, DoS attacks are often used for unfair competition and other illegal purposes.
You might also want to check out what a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) is and how to protect against it.