Feedly blames weeklong slowdown on a bug, not its AI pivot

Feedly, the largest stand-alone RSS reader worldwide, has experienced technical issues for over a week, and paying users are upset that the web app has been “unusably slow.” Some users have also reported that the company has ignored their support requests.

Feedly, the heir to the market Google ceded when it closed Google Reader in 2013, is today among the most successful RSS newsreaders globally, with 15 million users according to its website — larger than competitors like the web-based Inoreader and desktop apps such as NetNewsWire and Reeder. Yet the app is experiencing issues affecting both free and paying users. The most critical problem is a significant slowdown on the web app that has made browsing feeds frustrating; users on Reddit reported the app running “extremely” slow and “unusable.” Users also said the company’s iOS app, including on the iOS 27 beta, hasn’t been working, and that the classic version of Feedly’s mobile app — preferred by a small subset of customers — was shut down without warning weeks ago.

As most consumers now keep up with news through dedicated apps and social media, the market for RSS readers has always been relatively small. Feedly has been working to shift its focus to AI, offering businesses a way to track emerging threats and keep up with tailored intelligence through its app — raising the question of whether Feedly is still focused on its core RSS customers amid that pivot.

Feedly CEO Edwin Khodabakchian told TechCrunch: “Despite the pivot to cyber threat intelligence, fixing the basic RSS functionality is still a priority because our CTI community uses the news-reading capability. Our goal has been to maintain the Feedly News Reader as fast and streamlined as possible.” He said the web app issues were attributed to a bug related to using “Mark as Read” on accounts with many folders, and that a fix was released Friday, though the team is still confirming whether it resolved the problem for all users. He also confirmed the Feedly Classic app was “retired two weeks ago” because it no longer met some iOS and Android requirements, noting it had only a few hundred active users at the time and that the team did not notify those users before the shutdown. Khodabakchian said he was not aware of the iOS app issues but promised the company would investigate and fix them quickly.

Why it matters

A prolonged outage at the market’s largest RSS reader, arriving during its pivot toward AI-driven threat intelligence, tests whether Feedly can keep serving its original news-reading base while chasing a new enterprise product.