Future Tense

Evernote and Feedly Are Recovering After Sustained Hacker Attacks

Evernote’s play by play.

Photo from Twitter.

Evernote and Feedly—the popular note-taking app and RSS reader respectively—were both down for many hours on Wednesday because of a sustained hacker attack. Though the sites are starting to restore service, users may have still have intermittent problems.

Similar to a hack of the event coordination site Meetup a few months ago, Evernote and Feedly faced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in which hackers use multiple computers and a high volume of queries to overwhelm a company’s servers. According to a blog post from Feedly, the hackers asked for a ransom, but Feedly refused to pay any money, similar to how Meetup handled the situation in March.

“We are working in parallel with other victims of the same group and with law enforcement,” the post said. And an update added, “We’re making some changes to our infrastructure that will allow us to bring feedly back online.” Feedly repeatedly assured its users that their personal data within the service had not been compromised during the attack.

Evernote, which syncs with Feedly, was able to restore service more quickly after the attack. DDoS attacks are on the rise, and there have been other high-profile attacks involving ransom requests lately. Danger may lurk behind any server request.