Fastly is an American

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

services provider. It describes its network as an edge cloud platform, which is designed to help developers extend their core cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users. The Fastly edge cloud platform includes their

content delivery network A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially re ...

(CDN), image optimization, video and streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services. Fastly's cloud security services include

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

protection, bot mitigation, and a web application firewall. Fastly's web application firewall uses the Open Web Application Security Project

ModSecurity ModSecurity, sometimes called Modsec, is an open-source web application firewall (WAF). Originally designed as a module for the Apache HTTP Server, it has evolved to provide an array of Hypertext Transfer Protocol request and response filterin ...

Core Rule Set alongside its own ruleset. The Fastly platform is built on top of

Varnish Varnish is a clear transparent hard protective coating or film. It is not a stain. It usually has a yellowish shade from the manufacturing process and materials used, but it may also be pigmented as desired, and is sold commercially in various ...

. As of December 2021, Fastly transfers 50–100Tbps of data.

History

Fastly was founded in 2011 by the

Swedish-American Swedish Americans ( sv, svenskamerikaner) are Americans of Swedish ancestry. They include the 1.2 million Swedish immigrants during 1865–1915, who formed tight-knit communities, as well as their descendants and more recent immigrants. Today, ...

entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at

Wikia Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities before 2007 and later Wikia before 2019) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e. video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). Its domain is operated by Fandom, ...

(now Fandom). In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding. In April 2014, the company announced that they had acquired CDN Sumo, a CDN add-on for

Heroku Heroku is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) supporting several programming languages. One of the first cloud platforms, Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now supports Java, ...

. In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding, followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015. In September 2015,

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users. In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a

web application firewall A web application firewall (WAF) is a specific form of application firewall that filters, monitors, and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web service. By inspecting HTTP traffic, it can prevent attacks exploiting a web application's known vul ...

. Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017, and another $40 million in July 2018. The company filed for an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

(IPO) in April 2019 and debut on the

New York Stock Exchange The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed c ...

on May 17, 2019. In February 2020, Bergman stepped down as CEO and assumed the role of chief architect and executive chairperson; Joshua Bixby took over the CEO role. In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock). In June 2021, Ronald W. Kisling, previously employed by

Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...

as the CFO of the

Fitbit Fitbit (stylized as fitbit) is an American consumer electronics and fitness company. It produces wireless-enabled wearable technology, physical fitness monitors and activity trackers such as smartwatches, pedometers and monitors for heart rate ...

division, was hired to serve as Fastly's CFO, succeeding Adriel Lares. He assumed the position in August 2021. In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired

Glitch A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system, such as a transient fault that corrects itself, making it difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics industries, in circuit bending, as well as among ...

, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers. In August 2022, Todd Nightingale, previously employed by

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

as Executive Vice President of Enterprise Networking and Cloud business, was hired to serve as Fastly's CEO, succeeding Joshua Bixby.

Operation

Fastly's CDN service follows the

reverse proxy In computer networks, a reverse proxy is the application that sits in front of back-end applications and forwards client (e.g. browser) requests to those applications. Reverse proxies help increase scalability, performance, resilience and securi ...

model, routing all website traffic through their own servers instead of providing a 'cdn.mydomain.com' address to store site-specific files. It then fetches content from the

point of presence A point of presence (PoP) is an artificial demarcation point or network interface point between communicating entities. A common example is an ISP point of presence, the local access point that allows users to connect to the Internet with their ...

nearest to the location of the requesting user, out of nearly 60 worldwide. It is priced as a pay-as-you-go service subject to a

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

50 per month minimum charge, with bandwidth charged at variable rates depending on region. Content is not directly uploaded to their servers, rather it is pulled periodically from the origin server and cached in order to reduce the time required for an end-user to access the content. Fastly supports the UDP based

HTTP/3 HTTP/3 is the third major version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol used to exchange information on the World Wide Web, complementing the widely-deployed HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. Unlike previous versions which relied on the well-established TCP ( ...

protocol, as well as

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militai ...

enabled content,

encryption In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can decip ...

and secure tokens to restrict media access. On 8 June 2021, Fastly reported problems with their

CDN CDN may refer to: Places * Canada (Canadian), a North American country * , a neighborhood in Montreal, Quebec, Canada Technology * Content delivery network, on the Internet * Change detection and notification, of Web pages Transportation * Can ...

service which caused many major websites, such as

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...

gov.uk gov.uk (styled on the site as GOV.UK) is a United Kingdom public sector information website, created by the Government Digital Service to provide a single point of access to HM Government services. The site launched as a beta on 31 January 2012, ...

Twitch Twitch may refer to: Biology * Muscle contraction ** Convulsion, rapid and repeated muscle contraction and relaxation ** Fasciculation, a small, local, involuntary muscle contraction ** Myoclonic twitch, a jerk usually caused by sudden muscle con ...

Spotify Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...

and

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

, along with major news sources such as ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'',

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the M ...

and the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

, to become unavailable. Affected tech news outlet ''

The Verge ''The Verge'' is an American technology news website operated by Vox Media, publishing news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, consumer electronics news, and podcasts. The website launched on November 1, 2011, and uses Vox Media' ...

'' resorted to using

Google Docs Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes: Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. Google Do ...

to report on the ongoing outage. It also affected certain parts of other major websites, such as the servers hosting the

emojis An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversa ...

used by

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, resulting in them becoming inaccessible. The outage was resolved by Fastly after a few hours. Fastly has since stated that the cause of the outage was a

software bug A software bug is an error, flaw or fault in the design, development, or operation of computer software that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The process of finding and correcting bugs i ...

triggered by a specific user configuration.

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2011 establishments in California 2019 initial public offerings American companies established in 2011 Cloud computing providers Cloud platforms Companies based in San Francisco Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange Computer security companies Content delivery networks DDoS mitigation companies Internet properties established in 2011 Internet security Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies established in 2011 Software companies of the United States