Feedly has been one of the most popular feed readers in the wake of the Google Reader shutdown, but the service is having a rough morning. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was launched on Feedly late last night and has continued all morning. According to the Feedly blog, the company is working to mitigate the impact and bring Feedly back online, but it's slow going.

Update 1: Feedly says the attack was neutralized as of 3:07PM PT. Everything should be getting back to normal now.

Update 2: A second wave of DDoS attacks spun up on June 12th. These were neutralized as of 11:30AM PT.

The attack is being perpetrated by criminal elements that are attempting to extort money from Feedly in exchange for stopping the attack. Feedly has refused to pay up and is working with its infrastructure providers to reduce the impact of the attack, and with law enforcement to investigate the incident. No user data is believed to have been compromised or lost as a result of the malicious activity.

A DDoS is simply a way of flooding a web server with requests from multiple clients until all the resources are used up and things get crashy. So refreshing Feedly every few minutes isn't going to help. The company is working to get things operational again. As of the last update at 6:25 AM PST, Feedly was working on changing some infrastructure around to get back online.

[Feedly Blog]