Twitter
"Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS)," Feedly's founder and CEO Edwin Khodabakchian wrote in a blog post. "The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can."
For those unfamiliar, a denial-of-service or distributed denial-of-service attack involves interrupting a host's connection to the internet by flooding the target machine with bogus communications requests so it's too overloaded to respond to legitimate requests from real users. This usually causes the service to stall, or be too slow to the point of unavailable.
Four hours after Feedly's initial post, the company's CEO said it is working with network providers and making changes to its infrastructure to bring the service back online as soon as possible, but it might take a few hours to get everything in place.
"Thank you so much for your patience and for sticking with us," Khodabakchian said. "Remember, none of your data was compromised or lost in this attack."
Feedly's popularity has soared since Google shuttered its own RSS service Google Reader last year. Last May, the company said it had more than 12 million users.