Feedly is down following a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS)

Feedly, an RSS news aggregator, has been down for several hours today following a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). It appears that criminals are attacking feedly trying to extort money to make it stop.

Owners announced the DDoS attack on the Feedly blog and on twitter. This is what the blog post said:

Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). 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.

We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement.

We want to apologize for the inconvenience. Please know that you data is safe and you will be able to re-access your feedly as soon as the attack is neutralized.

An update posted on 6:25am PST says:

We’re making some changes to our infrastructure that will allow us to bring feedly back online. However, these things take some time to put into place and it may still be a few more hours before service is restored. Thank you so much for your patience and for sticking with us. Remember, none of your data was compromised or lost in this attack.

Feedly is an application for various Web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android, also available as a cloud-based service. It compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize and share with others. Feedly was first released by DevHD in 2008. I have been using Feedly since Google discontinued Google Reader last year.