At the height of the browser wars I once woke up to Microsoft hotlinking a small button for downloading our software from the MSN homepage. I tried to reach someone there for hours but nobody cared enough to do something about it. The image was small (no more than a few K), but the millions of requests that page got were enough to totally kill our server.
Finally, I replaced the image on there with a 'Netscape Now' button. Within 15 minutes the matter was resolved.