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Fastly

Fastly, Inc. is an American company based in San Francisco, which describes itself as a cloud computing company.[2] 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.[3]

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).[4][5] In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding.[6] In April 2014, the company announced that it had acquired CDN Sumo, a CDN add-on for Heroku.[7] In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding,[8] followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015.[9]

In September 2015, Google partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users.[10] In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a web application firewall.[11][12]

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017,[13] and another $40 million in July 2018.[14] The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019.[15][16]

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.[17]

In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock).[18]

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.[19]

On 8 June 2021, Fastly reported problems with its CDN service which caused many major websites, such as Reddit, gov.uk, and Amazon, along with major news sources such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC, to become unavailable.[20] The outage was resolved by Fastly after a few hours. Fastly reported that the cause of the outage was a software bug triggered by a specific user configuration.[21]

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers.[22][23]

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.[24]

In August 2023, it was announced Fastly has acquired the domain status API provider, Domainr.[25]

In August of 2024, Fastly laid off 11% of its work force.[26] Later in December 2024, Fastly issued $150 million in convertible senior notes with a 7.75% yield as part of a major debt restructuring.[27]

Kip Compton as CEO (2025–present)

In June 2025, Kip Compton was appointed CEO. Kip was formerly Chief Product Officer,[28] and previously held leadership roles at Cisco and Comcast.[29]

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.[30]

In March 2026, Fastly appointed Joan Jenkins as chief marketing officer.[31]

Operation

Fastly's CDN service follows the reverse proxy model, routing all website traffic through its own servers instead of providing a 'cdn.mydomain.com' address to store site-specific files. It then fetches content from the point of presence nearest to the location of the requesting user. Content is not directly uploaded to its 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.[32] Fastly offers semantic web caching as a feature.[33]

Fastly supports the UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol, as well as DRM enabled content, encryption and secure tokens to restrict media access.[32][34]

The Fastly platform uses a heavily modified version of Varnish for its caching infrastructure.[35] As of December 31, 2025, Fastly reported 532 Tbps of edge network capacity.[36]

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.[37] 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.[38]

External links

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. Discontent and disruption in the world of content delivery networks TechCrunch, June 2017^
  4. Jordan Novet. Fastly grabs $40M on its quest to build a big, cool content-delivery network VentureBeat, September 16, 2014, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  5. Nick Rockwell. Open Questions: A Conversation with Fastly CEO Artur Bergman The New York Times, 2018-09-07, retrieved 2022-05-30^
  6. Fastly Raises $10M for Content Delivery Network Built for Mobile, Real-Time World TechCrunch, June 6, 2013, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  7. Ryan Richards. Ruby on Rails on Fastly www.fastly.com, April 16, 2014, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  8. Ron Miller. Fastly Growing Quickly Snags $40M As VCs Give Generously TechCrunch, September 16, 2014, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  9. Frederic Lardinois. Fastly Raises $75M For Its Real-Time CDN TechCrunch, August 5, 2015, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  10. Google Partners With CloudFlare, Fastly, Level 3 And Highwinds To Help Developers Push Google Cloud Content To Users Faster TechCrunch, 9 September 2015^
  11. Ben Kepes. In the need for speed, Fastly goes all the way to the edge Computerworld, April 18, 2017, retrieved October 10, 2017^
  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. Romain Dillet. Fastly raises another $40 million before an IPO TechCrunch, July 17, 2018, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  15. Jonathan Shieber. Fastly, the content delivery network, files for an IPO TechCrunch, April 20, 2019, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  16. Jordan Novet. Fastly shares rocket as much as 60% in IPO debut CNBC, May 17, 2019, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  17. Megan Hernbroth. '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, February 23, 2020, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  18. Jonathan Shieber. LA gets a big SaaS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M TechCrunch, August 27, 2020, retrieved December 23, 2020^
  19. Mark Maurer. Cloud-Services Firm Fastly Hires Google Executive as CFO Wall Street Journal, 2021-06-29, retrieved 2021-07-07^
  20. Manish Singh, Romain Dillet. Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit and more go down in Fastly CDN outage TechCrunch, 8 June 2021, retrieved 2021-06-08^
  21. How One Fastly Customer Broke The Internet Gizmodo, 9 June 2021, retrieved 2021-06-13^
  22. Jacob Kastrenakes. Glitch acquired by cloud service provider Fastly The Verge, 2022-05-19, retrieved 2022-05-20^
  23. Kylie Robison. $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^
  24. Gina Narcisi. Cisco Networking And Cloud Leader Todd Nightingale to join Fastly as CEO CRN, 2022-08-03, retrieved 2022-08-03^
  25. Fastly acquires Domainr and launches new TLS Certification Authority SiliconANGLE, 2023-08-17, retrieved 2023-08-18^
  26. Tiyashi Datta. Fastly to reduce global headcount by 11% (NYSE:FSLY) seekingalpha.com, 2024-08-08, retrieved 2024-11-05^
  27. Fastly's Debt Restructuring: An Analytical Study^
  28. Fastly CEO plots course through AI and security ComputerWeekly.com, retrieved 2025-11-07^
  29. Fastly Welcomes Kip Compton as CEO to Accelerate Business Strategy retrieved 2025-11-07^
  30. Fastly Announces Listing Transfer to Nasdaq Fastly Investor Relations, 2025-11-26, retrieved 2026-04-09^
  31. Fastly Appoints Joan Jenkins as Chief Marketing Officer to Accelerate Growth and Market Leadership Fastly Investor Relations, 2026-03-31, retrieved 2026-04-09^
  32. Mike Williams. Fastly review TechRadar, 15 February 2021^
  33. Kyt Dotson. Fastly releases global cloud AI accelerator to help developers reduce costs and boost performance Silicon Angle, June 13, 2024, retrieved July 8, 2024^
  34. David Sudia. How to Get Started with HTTP/3 The New Stack, 2023-01-05, retrieved 2023-05-12^
  35. VCL reference Fastly Documentation, retrieved 2026-04-09^
  36. About our company - Fueling the future of the web Fastly, retrieved 2026-04-09^
  37. Katie Dee. Fastly Revamps Partner Program To Harness 'Huge Untapped Potential' In The Channel CRN, The Channel Company, March 27, 2023, retrieved May 29, 2024^
  38. Zach Thompson. Fastly enters Google agreement to operate OHTTP Relay IT Brief Australia, 2023-03-17, retrieved 2025-09-20^