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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
