Fastly

Fastly, Inc.
TypePublic
IndustryInternet
FoundedMarch 2011; 15 years ago (2011-03)
Founder
  • Artur Bergman
  • Simon Wistow
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people
Joan Jenkins (CMO)
Services
RevenueIncrease US$624.0 million (2025)
Negative increase US$−119.0 million (2025)
Negative increase US$−121.7 million (2025)
Total assetsIncrease US$1.499 billion (2025)
Total equityDecrease US$929.6 million (2025)
Number of employees
1,140 (2025)
ASN
  • 54113
Websitefastly.com
Footnotes

Fastly, Inc. is an American company based in San Francisco, which describes itself as a cloud computing company. Fastly provides content delivery network services, image optimization, and load balancing services. Fastly's cloud security services include denial-of-service attack protection, bot mitigation, and a web application firewall.

History

Founding and IPO (2011–2019)

Fastly was founded in 2011 by the Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at Wikia (now Fandom). In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding. In April 2014, the company announced that it had acquired CDN Sumo, a CDN add-on for Heroku. 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 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.

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in May 2017, and another $40 million in July 2018. The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019.

Joshua Bixby as CEO (2020–2022)

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 as the CFO of the Fitbit division, was hired to serve as Fastly's CFO, succeeding Adriel Lares. He assumed the position in August 2021.

On 8 June 2021, a software bug in Fastly's CDN, triggered by a valid customer configuration change, temporarily disrupted access to major websites, including Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, GOV.UK, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC. According to Fastly, 95% of its network was operating normally within 49 minutes. The incident prompted discussion about the internet's reliance on a small number of CDN providers.

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers.

Todd Nightingale as CEO (2022-2025)

In August 2022, Todd Nightingale, previously an executive VP at Cisco, was hired to serve as Fastly's CEO, succeeding Joshua Bixby.

In March 2023, Fastly made all of its network services and web application security products available to its partners. Previously, some of the company's partners had only been able to sell specific Fastly products, such as its web application firewall. Also in March 2023, Fastly announced an Oblivious HTTP relay service to enable clients, such as Google Chrome, to improve anonymity of end users while gathering data.

In August 2023, Fastly announced that it had acquired the domain status API provider, Domainr.

In August of 2024, Fastly laid off 11% of its work force. Later in December 2024, Fastly issued $150 million in convertible senior notes due in 2028, carrying an annual interest rate of 7.75%..

Kip Compton as CEO (2025–present)

In June 2025, Kip Compton was appointed CEO. Kip was formerly Chief Product Officer, and previously held leadership roles at Cisco and Comcast.

In November 2025, Fastly announced that it would transfer its stock exchange listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The company began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol FSLY in December 2025.

In March 2026, Fastly appointed Joan Jenkins as chief marketing officer.

Products and services

Fastly provides content delivery, edge computing, security, and observability services.

Content delivery

Fastly operates a content delivery network (CDN) that caches web content, delivers live and on-demand video, and serves application programming interface (API) responses through geographically distributed points of presence. Its CDN follows a reverse-proxy model, routing requests through Fastly's servers. Content is retrieved from customers' origin servers and cached to reduce the time required for users to access it. Fastly also offers semantic caching through its AI Accelerator, which caches responses to similar AI prompts to reduce latency and API calls.

The platform supports static and dynamic content delivery, configurable caching rules, and instant purging, which allows customers to invalidate cached content across the network. According to Fastly, its mean global cache purge time was less than 150 milliseconds as of December 31, 2025.

Fastly supports the UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol, as well as digital rights management (DRM)-enabled content, encryption, and secure tokens to restrict media access. Its caching infrastructure uses a heavily modified version of Varnish. Fastly's network map listed 622 Tbps of connected global capacity as of June 30, 2026.

Edge computing

Fastly Compute, formerly called Compute@Edge, is a serverless edge computing platform that runs application code on Fastly's distributed network. It uses a WebAssembly (Wasm) runtime based on Wasmtime to execute code in isolated sandboxed environments close to end users. By default, each request starts a new sandbox.

Fastly also co-founded the Bytecode Alliance, an organization supporting the development of WebAssembly technologies.

Developers can write Compute applications in languages including JavaScript, Rust, C++, and Go. Support for other languages depends on compatibility with WebAssembly and the platform's interfaces.

Fastly provides key-value and object storage services for applications using its platform, alongside Fanout for real-time publish-subscribe messaging.

Security

Fastly provides web application security, API discovery and enforcement, bot management, and protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Its Next-Gen web application firewall (WAF) is based on technology from Signal Sciences, which Fastly acquired in 2020. The firewall analyzes HTTP requests and applies detection signals and rules to identify and block attacks such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting.


In 2024, Fastly introduced Bot Management, which classifies automated traffic at the network edge and provides controls to allow, challenge, or block bots. Fastly also offers API Security, Client-Side Protection, and DDoS Protection.

In 2025, Fastly reported that its Next-Gen WAF and Bot Management products protected more than 130,000 applications and APIs and inspected over 6.5 trillion requests per month.

Observability

Fastly provides observability tools for monitoring traffic, performance, and security events on its network. These include real-time log streaming to external analytics platforms and security information and event management (SIEM) systems. Its monitoring tools include Custom Dashboards, Log Explorer & Insights, Domain Inspector, and Origin Inspector.

Research

Fastly publishes security research based on traffic observed through its services, including analyses of AI crawlers and other automated requests. A 2025 report attributed 95% of the AI crawler traffic in its dataset to Meta, Google, and OpenAI. A report published in 2026 found that bots accounted for 49% of the requests analyzed during January of that year and classified 99% of that bot traffic as unwanted or unverifiable.

References

  1. ↑ "US SEC: Form 10-K Fastly, Inc". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 26 February 2025.
  2. ↑ "S-1 Registration Statement, Fastly Inc". www.sec.gov. Retrieved 2024-10-11.
  3. 1 2 Kepes, Ben (April 18, 2017). "In the need for speed, Fastly goes all the way to the edge". Computerworld. Archived from the original on April 19, 2017. Retrieved October 10, 2017.
  4. ↑ "Discontent and disruption in the world of content delivery networks". TechCrunch. June 2017.
  5. ↑ Novet, Jordan (September 16, 2014). "Fastly grabs $40M on its quest to build a big, cool content-delivery network". VentureBeat. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
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  7. ↑ "Fastly Raises $10M for Content Delivery Network Built for Mobile, Real-Time World". TechCrunch. June 6, 2013. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  8. ↑ Richards, Ryan (April 16, 2014). "Ruby on Rails on Fastly". www.fastly.com. Archived from the original on December 23, 2020. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  9. ↑ Miller, Ron (September 16, 2014). "Fastly Growing Quickly Snags $40M As VCs Give Generously". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  10. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (August 5, 2015). "Fastly Raises $75M For Its Real-Time CDN". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  11. ↑ "Google Partners With CloudFlare, Fastly, Level 3 And Highwinds To Help Developers Push Google Cloud Content To Users Faster". TechCrunch. 9 September 2015.
  12. ↑ "Fastly Releases Edge Cloud Platform". Bizty.
  13. ↑ "Fastly raises another $50 million for its content delivery networking technology". TechCrunch. 23 May 2017. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  14. ↑ Dillet, Romain (July 17, 2018). "Fastly raises another $40 million before an IPO". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  15. ↑ Shieber, Jonathan (April 20, 2019). "Fastly, the content delivery network, files for an IPO". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  16. ↑ Novet, Jordan (May 17, 2019). "Fastly shares rocket as much as 60% in IPO debut". CNBC. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  17. ↑ Hernbroth, Megan (February 23, 2020). "'I like being in the trenches': Fastly CEO steps down after disappointing market debuts, citing his 'true strengths and passions' as a developer instead of company leader". Business Insider Australia. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  18. ↑ Shieber, Jonathan (August 27, 2020). "LA gets a big SaaS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  19. ↑ Maurer, Mark (2021-06-29). "Cloud-Services Firm Fastly Hires Google Executive as CFO". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
  20. ↑ Singh, Manish; Dillet, Romain (8 June 2021). "Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit and more go down in Fastly CDN outage". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2021-06-08.
  21. ↑ Wodinsky, Shoshana (9 June 2021). "How One Fastly Customer Broke the Internet". Gizmodo.
  22. 1 2 Browne, Ryan; Shead, Sam (8 June 2021). "What is Fastly and why did it just take a bunch of major websites offline?". CNBC.
  23. ↑ Rockwell, Nick (8 June 2021). "Summary of June 8 outage". Fastly.
  24. ↑ Meyer, David (8 June 2021). "From WhiteHouse.gov to Reddit: Fastly CDN outage knocks out sites and services around the world". Fortune.
  25. ↑ Haskell-Dowland, Paul. "Fastly global internet outage: why did so many sites go down — and what is a CDN, anyway?". The Conversation.
  26. ↑ Kastrenakes, Jacob (2022-05-19). "Glitch acquired by cloud service provider Fastly". The Verge. Retrieved 2022-05-20.
  27. ↑ Robison, Kylie. "$1.3 billion cloud company Fastly is acquiring popular developer startup Glitch in a push to help coders build bigger, better apps". Business Insider. Retrieved 2024-07-23.
  28. ↑ Narcisi, Gina (2022-08-03). "Cisco Networking And Cloud Leader Todd Nightingale to join Fastly as CEO". CRN. Retrieved 2022-08-03.
  29. ↑ Dee, Katie (2023-03-27). "Fastly Revamps Partner Program To Harness 'Huge Untapped Potential' In The Channel". CRN. The Channel Company. Retrieved 2024-05-29.
  30. ↑ Thompson, Zach (2023-03-17). "Fastly enters Google agreement to operate OHTTP Relay". IT Brief Australia. Retrieved 2025-09-20.
  31. ↑ "Fastly acquires Domainr and launches new TLS Certification Authority". SiliconANGLE. 2023-08-17. Retrieved 2023-08-18.
  32. ↑ Datta, Tiyashi (2024-08-08). "Fastly to reduce global headcount by 11% (NYSE:FSLY) | Seeking Alpha". seekingalpha.com. Retrieved 2024-11-05.
  33. ↑ "Fastly, Inc.: Form 8-K". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 2024-12-05.
  34. ↑ "Fastly's Debt Restructuring: An Analytical Study".
  35. 1 2 "Fastly Welcomes Kip Compton as CEO to Accelerate Business Strategy | The Software Report". Retrieved 2025-11-07.
  36. ↑ "Fastly CEO plots course through AI and security | Computer Weekly". ComputerWeekly.com. Retrieved 2025-11-07.
  37. ↑ "Fastly Announces Listing Transfer to Nasdaq". Fastly Investor Relations. 2025-11-26. Retrieved 2026-04-09.
  38. ↑ "Fastly Appoints Joan Jenkins as Chief Marketing Officer to Accelerate Growth and Market Leadership". Fastly Investor Relations. 2026-03-31. Retrieved 2026-04-09.
  39. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Fastly Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  40. 1 2 3 Williams, Mike (15 February 2021). "Fastly review". TechRadar.
  41. ↑ Dotson, Kyt (2024-06-13). "Fastly releases global cloud AI accelerator to help developers reduce costs and boost performance". SiliconANGLE. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  42. 1 2 "Fastly network map". Fastly. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  43. ↑ "Fastly Help Guides" (PDF). Fastly Documentation. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  44. ↑ "Rust SDK 0.9.9". Fastly Documentation. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  45. 1 2 "Getting started with Compute". Fastly Documentation. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  46. ↑ Clark, Lin (2019-11-12). "Announcing the Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure by default, composable future for WebAssembly". Bytecode Alliance. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  47. ↑ "Edge Compute". Fastly. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  48. ↑ "Compute language SDKs". Fastly Documentation. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  49. ↑ "About API Enforcement". Fastly Documentation.
  50. ↑ "Fastly to Acquire Web Application Security Firm Signal Sciences for $775 Million". SecurityWeek. August 2020. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  51. ↑ "Fastly to Acquire Signal Sciences for $775M". Dark Reading. 2020-08-28. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  52. ↑ Shieber, Jonathan (August 27, 2020). "LA gets a big SaaS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  53. ↑ "Fastly annual report". Fastly Investor Relations. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  54. ↑ "Next-Gen WAF Detection & Blocking". Fastly. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  55. ↑ "Fastly Unveils New Bot Management Solution to Help Detect and Block Threats at the Edge". Fastly Investor Relations. 2024-04-02. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  56. 1 2 Halfacree, Gareth (2025-08-21). "AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders". The Register. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  57. ↑ "Log management and observability platforms". Fastly Documentation. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  58. ↑ "Real-Time Observability & Edge Visibility Platform". Fastly.
  59. ↑ "Rise of AI crawlers and bots causing web traffic havoc". Computerworld. 2025-08-21. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  60. ↑ French, Laura (2026-04-17). "Bot traffic makes up 49% of online activity, but 99% of bots unwanted". SC Media. Retrieved 2026-10-02.
  61. ↑ "Nearly Half the Web Isn't Human: Inside Fastly's Threat Insight Report". Fastly. 2026-04-16. Retrieved 2026-10-02.