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.
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.