A fake "grass roots" campaign was started on Reddit, where numerous sock puppet accounts were used to bombard the /r/bitcoin subreddit with calls to change Bitcoin's "block size limit" to a much larger number.
This would allow more transactions per second, at the cost of hurting Bitcoin's P2P decentralization (the main thing it is good at). These posters claimed there was a dire, urgent need to do this immediately, and used spam transaction attacks on the network to make it look necessary.
They also used downvoting/upvoting scripts to push their posts to the top, and to censor the developer's responses (reddit hides posts with a -5 score; any post by developers instantly would be downvoted to that level).
They harassed the developers with constant personal attacks, to the point that it became impossible for them to engage the community. They also flooded the development mailing list, and many developers unsubscribed.
As for the "block size increase", an absurd number was picked (20x increase), and knowing that the developers would not go along with it, the "solution" proposed was a fork of the both the software and the network itself called "Bitcoin XT".
All but 2 of the 90+ Bitcoin developers thought this was a terrible idea, especially since they have come up with much safer and better solutions to achieve the same goal (scaling up the transactions per second).
Yet when this fork attempt failed to gain any support, a better funded, even more aggressive second attempt (oddly named "Bitcoin Classic") started being promoted.
It is being pushed by the CEO of Coinbase (the author of this blog post) and backed by some of the other bitcoin exchange's CEOs.
I think the creator of bittorrent, Bram Cohen, sums up what developers and the larger technical community are thinking about these takeover attempts- https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/697705876337995776