14 DAY TRIAL // Feedly is currently facing the third DDoS attack in just as many days, much to everyone’s frustration.
The RSS reader announced the troubles via Twitter, where it admitted that the service was being targeted by a third round of DDoS attacks. “We’re working on it. Sorry for the inconvenience,” wrote the Feedly team.
This is the third day in a row when the company faces a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Over the past days, the company has mentioned that criminals have been attacking the service and trying to extort money from Feedly in order to make them stop.
Understandably, the company didn’t give in and worked alongside the network providers to mitigate the attack as best as possible. Within a few hours, the attacks were neutralized, while user data was kept safe from hackers.
It looks like the initial attack wasn’t actually neutralized as originally stated by Feedly, but rather it managed to get back online between the assaults for brief periods.
Even in the past hour since the latest attack started, users have managed to get online, but the feeds weren’t marked accordingly, with all entries appearing unread.
Feedly is currently being targeted by a third round of DDoS attacks. We are working on it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
— feedly (@feedly) June 13, 2014
Incapsula co-founder Marc Gaffan told Softpedia following the first round of attacks that this was likely a way for hackers to “flex their muscles.”
“Further evidence of this is that some of the official government sites we work with have seen an escalation in DDoS activity in the last week. What we’re seeing with Evernote and Feedly might just be a prelude to the real show,” he said ominously, referring to the attacks planned on the sponsors of the World Cup.
Update: Feedly seems to be back in working order, although there's been no word from the company about an official fix for the troubles or any information on whether or not the attack was mitigated.
Most likely, the company has managed to fend off the attack at least for a while, but it is not sure about its success due to the relentlessness shown by the attackers. One interesting thing is that there's been no other mention of any extortion effort as it happened in the first day of the attack.
Whether or not those at fault here are going to stop anytime soon remains to be seen, but the situation is quite frustrating for both the company and the users of the service.