Feedly attributes weeklong slowdown to bug, not its AI pivot

Feedly, which inherited much of the market after Google shut down Google Reader in 2013, says it has 15 million users, making it larger than competitors such as Inoreader and desktop apps like NetNewsWire and Reeder. The recent problems have affected both free and paying users, with the most critical issue being a significant slowdown in the web app that made browsing feeds difficult. Users on Reddit described the app running “extremely” slow and “unusable.”

Other reported issues include problems with Feedly’s iOS app, including on the iOS 27 beta, and the shutdown weeks ago of the “classic” version of its mobile app without warning. The classic app had been removed from the App Store long before its final shutdown, and according to CEO Edwin Khodabakchian, it had only a few hundred active users at the time.

TechCrunch reached out to Feedly after multiple customers on Reddit said their technical support requests had been ignored. In response, Khodabakchian said fixing basic RSS functionality is still a priority because the company’s cyber threat intelligence community relies on the news-reading capability. “Our goal has been to maintain the Feedly News Reader as fast and streamlined as possible,” he said.

The CEO said the web app issue was attributed to a bug related to using “Mark as Read” on accounts with many folders, and a fix was released Friday. The company is still confirming whether the fix resolved the problem for all users. He also said he was not aware of the iOS app loading issues but promised Feedly would investigate and fix them quickly, noting that the company still invests in its main iOS and Android apps.

After TechCrunch’s article was published, the issue was added to status.feedly.com so users would know it was a known problem being researched.