Within hours, according to the cybersecurity researchers at Panda Labs, the loose group of hackers that calls itself Anonymous launched a distributed denial of service attack that threw junk traffic at the web server of the blog that had made the WikiLeaks announcement, and by 4am had taken the site offline.

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Understandably, the Reader shutdown was received not just as the end of an era but almost as an attack on those who count on it for traffic and attention.

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Despite no concrete evidence of a breach or attack, the company says it is investigating unusual traffic patterns.

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So says the BBC, that the internet is currently suffering under the largest cyber-attack yet known and that this is slowing down traffic and sites right across the internet.

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The analogy used is that usually a DoS attack is like clogging up the on off ramps of a freeway: this amount of traffic is like clogging up the freeway itself.

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The volume of traffic between Yahoo's back end admin system and the wider internet during the attack strongly suggested that a file of 22 million IDs had been stolen.

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This so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack relies on having enough users, voluntary or not, to flood a site with so much traffic that it gets shunted offline.

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In 2002 they were flooded with traffic from tens of thousands of infected computers in an unsolved "distributed denial of service" attack.

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