Feedly falls in DDoS fight

Just after 2am US Pacific time last night, Feedly fell victim to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) attack that was set to last throughout the day.

"The attacker is trying to extort us money to make it stop," a post in the Feedly blog said. "We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can."

During that time, the attack was successful in making Feedly's popular RSS reader services inaccessable.

At 3pm, the company announced that it had "neutralized" the attack, and the 40 million RSS feeds polled by the service would begin to be updated.

"We would like to re-iterate that none of your data was compromised by this attack," a blog update from Feedly co-founder Edwin Khodabakchian said. "I would like to thank the ops team for working through the night to resume the service as quickly as possible."

The company said that it was working with law enforcement and "other victims of the same group".

Yesterday Evernote suffered a similar DDoS attack, which knocked the service offline for a number of hours.

Begun at 2:40pm, the note-taking app was unavailable for four hours before resuming normal service.

Although the size of the Feedly and Evernote attacks are not known, earlier this year a French website suffered a record-setting 400Gbps attack. The use of NTP reflection, a spoofing of a return IP address that sends a relatively large return packet from an NTP server to an unwitting victim, has gained prominence in recent times and was used against the French website in February.