Feedly criminally DDoSed in extortion scheme

RSS reader service Feedly has been down for most of the day:

2:04am PST – 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.

This sounds suspiciously like the same group that have been targeting Typepad, Basecampet al. Feedly has been the big victor in the post-Google Reader feed landscape, and its downtime has left a lot of people feeling cut off from the news and information sources.

Leaving aside my feeling of disconnection from the long-form web (alleviated by using Flipboard to track stories shared on Twitter), it’s interesting – and not a little worrying – to note that businesses which depend entirely on internet access to exist are being targeted for criminal extortion – and that the authorities are struggling to identify and shut down those responsible.