Google may state that its Google Reader service has seen its usage decline over the years, but the RSS service certainly has even less subscribers than it did Wednesday, when Google made the surprise announcement that it would shut down Google Reader on July 1st.

This weekend, the Feedly service announced on its blog that over 500,000 users of Google Reader have already made the switch to using Feedly. As you might expect, that surge of new users has put a strain on Feedly's infrastructure but the company says it has added new servers and increased its bandwidth by 10 times its previous limit to deal with the increased traffic.

Feedly offers a RSS plug in for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox web browsers in addition to offering free iOS and Android apps. In fact the Feedly iOS app jumped up this week to become the number one free downloaded app on iTunes. It has also been working on a project that's basically a clone of Google Reader, using the Google Reader API. Feedly claims that when Google Reader does shut down, users who are now using Feedly should experience a seamless transition.

Google has made no indication it plans to change its mind about shutting down Google Reader. An online petition that asks Google to do just that has now generated over 122,000 signatures as of this writing.

Source: Feedly | Image via Feedly