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Fastly runs a global network of servers that helps websites and apps deliver content fast and stay safe.
Fastly is a content delivery network, or CDN. When you load a news article, stream a video, or shop online, the files have to travel from wherever they're stored to your phone or laptop. If they came from a single faraway computer, everything would crawl. Fastly keeps copies of that content on servers spread around the world, so it reaches you from a nearby machine in milliseconds. It also runs security and computing services on top of that network, like blocking attacks and letting programmers run custom code right at the edge, close to users.
Fastly's customers are mostly businesses with heavy internet traffic: media and streaming companies, online retailers, banks, and software firms. They pay Fastly based on how much data flows through its network and which services they use. Big names have included Shopify, The New York Times, and streaming platforms. The pitch is speed, control, and quick customer support rather than the cheapest price. Fastly competes with giants like Akamai, Cloudflare, and Amazon's CloudFront, which are bigger and often cheaper, so Fastly has to win on performance and flexibility. The company's history includes a rough patch that explains a lot about it. In June 2021, a software bug caused a global outage that took down major websites for about an hour, a painful public black eye. More recently, Fastly has pushed beyond basic content delivery into security and edge computing, betting that customers want to run code and protection close to users, not just fetch files fast. It has grown revenue steadily but has struggled to turn a profit, which is common for smaller infrastructure companies fighting much larger rivals.
Simon Wistow and Artur Bergman once waited 17 hours for a content delivery network to deploy a single line of code, and they knew there had to be a better way. Their big idea was to push more code and logic out to the edge of the network, close to users, instead of keeping everything in a central core. That idea became the seed of Fastly, which the two men incorporated in 2011, drawing early hires who believed it could change how people build websites.
After years of building quietly, Fastly filed to go public in 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock priced at $16 a share, then shot up as much as 60% on its first day, a sign investors saw something special in the edge computing story.
In 2020, Fastly spent $775 million to buy the cybersecurity company Signal Sciences, mostly in stock. The deal pushed the company toward a vision of unified web application and API security and became the base of its Next-Gen WAF, a product line that grew from one offering to five and showed up in more than half of new business deals. Security was now a big part of who Fastly was.
As the pandemic kept people home and online, demand for bandwidth sent Fastly's usage-based revenue soaring, and the stock hit an all-time high in October 2020. Then the tailwind faded and growth slowed, and the shares came crashing back down, ending up below the price they fetched at the IPO.
A software bug, triggered by a perfectly valid customer configuration change, briefly knocked major sites like Reddit, Twitch, Amazon, The New York Times and the BBC offline. Fastly said 95% of its network was back to normal within 49 minutes, but the incident sparked a wider conversation about how much of the internet depends on just a few CDN providers.
After the outage and rattled investors, Fastly brought in Todd Nightingale, a former Cisco executive vice president, as CEO in 2022, replacing Joshua Bixby. The leadership change marked a turning point, and the business later steadied under his watch.
In 2025, Fastly promoted Kip Compton, its chief product officer and a veteran of Cisco and Comcast, to CEO. He brought in new leaders and rebuilt the go-to-market team, so the company could bring in substantially more revenue while spending less on sales and marketing.
In late 2025, Fastly announced it would move its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq Global Select Market. Trading under the ticker FSLY began on Nasdaq in December of that year.
At its 2026 Investor Day, Fastly laid out a target of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion in revenue by 2029, built around one unified edge cloud platform and customers buying more products. The company pointed to three straight quarters of at least 20% year-over-year growth, five quarters of improving net revenue retention and six quarters of positive free cash flow. It also pitched AI as the next growth engine, noting AI traffic was growing 6.5 times faster than human traffic, and rolled out Fastly for AI products including AI Runtime Control, AI Firewall and API Enforcement.
Fastly went public in 2019 and is based in San Francisco. Because it owns its network and software rather than reselling someone else's, it can respond quickly to customer needs, but building and maintaining that network costs real money. The big question hanging over the business is whether it can grow fast enough in security and edge computing to hold its own against competitors many times its size.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026