Fastly was founded in 2011 by the Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at Wikia (now Fandom).[8][9] In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding.[10] In April 2014, the company announced that it had acquired CDN Sumo, a CDN add-on for Heroku.[11] In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding,[12] followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015.[13]
In September 2015, Google partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users.[14] In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a web application firewall.[3][15]
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.[20]
In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock).[21]
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.[22][23]
In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers.[24][25]
On 8 June 2021, Fastly reported problems with their 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.[26] 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.[27][28]
In August 2022, Todd Nightingale, previously employed by Cisco as Executive Vice President of Enterprise Networking and Cloud business, was hired to serve as Fastly's CEO, succeeding Joshua Bixby.[29]
In August 2023, it was announced Fastly has acquired the domain status API provider, Domainr.[30]
In November 2023, Brett Shirk resigned as CRO,[31] he was replaced 6 months later by Scott Lovett.[32]
In August of 2024, Fastly laid off 11% of its work force. [33]
Operation
Fastly's CDN service follows the reverse proxy 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 nearest to the location of the requesting user. 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.[34] Fastly offers semanticweb caching as a feature.[35]
Fastly supports the UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol, as well as DRM enabled content, encryption and secure tokens to restrict media access.[34][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]
^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.
