Fastly

American web infrastructure company

Fastly, Inc.

Company type| Public

Traded as

* NYSE: FSLY (Class A)
* Russell 2000 component

Industry| Internet
Founded| March 2011; 14 years ago (2011-03)
Founder| Artur Bergman
Headquarters| San Francisco, California, U.S.

Key people

* Todd Nightingale (CEO)
* David Hornik (Chairman)
* Tyler McMullen (CTO)
* Ronald W. Kisling (CFO)

Services|

* Content delivery network
* Security as a service
* Serverless computing
* Website performance

Revenue|  US$506 million (2023)

Operating income

|  US$−198 million (2023)

Net income

|  US$−133 million (2023)
Total assets|  US$1.53 billion (2023)
Total equity|  US$979 million (2023)

Number of employees

| 1,207 (2023)
ASN|

* 54113

Website| www.fastly.com
Footnotes / references
[1]

Fastly, Inc. is an American cloud computing services provider based in San Francisco.[2] Fastly provides content delivery network services, cloud computing, cloud security, image optimization, and load balancing services.[3] Fastly's cloud security services include denial-of-service attack protection, bot mitigation, and a web application firewall.[4]

The Fastly platform is built on top of Varnish.[5] As of March 2024,[update] Fastly transfers 336 Tbps of data.[6][7][better source needed]

## History

[edit]

### Founding and IPO (2011-2019)

[edit]

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]

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017,[16] and another $40 million in July 2018.[17] The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019.[18][19]

### Joshua Bixby as CEO (2020-2022)

[edit]

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]

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.[24] 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.[25][26]

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers.[27][28]

### Todd Nightingale as CEO (2022-Present)

[edit]

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] Later in December 2024, Fastly issued $150 million in convertible senior notes with a 7.75% yield as part of a major debt restructuring. [34]

## Operation

[edit]

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.[35] Fastly offers semantic web caching as a feature.[36]

Fastly supports the UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol, as well as DRM enabled content, encryption and secure tokens to restrict media access.[35][37]

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.[38]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "US SEC: Form 10-K Fastly, Inc". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 22 February 2024.
2. ^ "S-1 Registration Statement, Fastly Inc". www.sec.gov. Retrieved 2024-10-11.
3. ^ a b 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. ^ "The benefits of using Varnish". Fastly.com. 30 March 2015. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
6. ^ "FastlyNetworkCapcity".
7. ^ "Fastly Inc (FSLY) Stock Price & News". Google Finance. Retrieved 2024-07-23.
8. ^ Novet, Jordan (September 16, 2014). "Fastly grabs $40M on its quest to build a big, cool content-delivery network". VentureBeat. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
9. ^ Rockwell, Nick (2018-09-07). "Open Questions: A Conversation with Fastly CEO Artur Bergman". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-05-30.
10. ^ "Fastly Raises $10M for Content Delivery Network Built for Mobile, Real-Time World". TechCrunch. June 6, 2013. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
11. ^ 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.
12. ^ Miller, Ron (September 16, 2014). "Fastly Growing Quickly Snags $40M As VCs Give Generously". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
13. ^ Lardinois, Frederic (August 5, 2015). "Fastly Raises $75M For Its Real-Time CDN". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
14. ^ "Google Partners With CloudFlare, Fastly, Level 3 And Highwinds To Help Developers Push Google Cloud Content To Users Faster". TechCrunch. 9 September 2015.
15. ^ "Fastly Releases Edge Cloud Platform". Bizty.
16. ^ "Fastly raises another $50 million for its content delivery networking technology". TechCrunch. 23 May 2017. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
17. ^ Dillet, Romain (July 17, 2018). "Fastly raises another $40 million before an IPO". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
18. ^ Shieber, Jonathan (April 20, 2019). "Fastly, the content delivery network, files for an IPO". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
19. ^ Novet, Jordan (May 17, 2019). "Fastly shares rocket as much as 60% in IPO debut". CNBC. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
20. ^ 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.
21. ^ 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.
22. ^ "Fastly Appoints Ron Kisling as CFO". www.businesswire.com. 2021-06-29. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
23. ^ Maurer, Mark (2021-06-29). "Cloud-Services Firm Fastly Hires Google Executive as CFO". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
24. ^ Singh, Manish; Dillet, Romain (8 June 2021). "Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit and more go down in Fastly CDN outage". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2021-06-08.
25. ^ Rockwell, Nick (2021-06-08). "Summary of June 8 outage". Fastly Blog. Retrieved 2021-06-09.
26. ^ "How One Fastly Customer Broke The Internet". Gizmodo. 9 June 2021. Retrieved 2021-06-13.
27. ^ Kastrenakes, Jacob (2022-05-19). "Glitch acquired by cloud service provider Fastly". The Verge. Retrieved 2022-05-20.
28. ^ 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.
29. ^ Narcisi, Gina (2022-08-03). "Cisco Networking And Cloud Leader Todd Nightingale to join Fastly as CEO". CRN. Retrieved 2022-08-03.
30. ^ "Fastly acquires Domainr and launches new TLS Certification Authority". SiliconANGLE. 2023-08-17. Retrieved 2023-08-18.
31. ^ MarketScreener (2023-11-29). "Fastly, Inc. Announces Resignation of Brett Shirk as Chief Revenue Officer, Effective on December 1, 2023 - MarketScreener". uk.marketscreener.com. Retrieved 2024-10-06.
32. ^ "Fastly Names Scott R. Lovett as Chief Revenue Officer". Yahoo Finance. 2024-05-28. Retrieved 2024-10-06.
33. ^ Datta, Tiyashi (2024-08-08). "Fastly to reduce global headcount by 11% (NYSE:FSLY) | Seeking Alpha". seekingalpha.com. Retrieved 2024-11-05.
34. ^ https://www.ainvest.com/news/fastly-s-debt-restructuring-an-analytical-study-24121010f4b7d08bd246b512/
35. ^ a b Williams, Mike (15 February 2021). "Fastly review". TechRadar.
36. ^ Dotson, Kyt (June 13, 2024). "Fastly releases global cloud AI accelerator to help developers reduce costs and boost performance". Silicon Angle. Retrieved July 8, 2024.
37. ^ Sudia, David (2023-01-05). "How to Get Started with HTTP/3". The New Stack. Retrieved 2023-05-12.
38. ^ Dee, Katie (March 27, 2023). "Fastly Revamps Partner Program To Harness 'Huge Untapped Potential' In The Channel". CRN. The Channel Company. Retrieved May 29, 2024.

## External links

[edit]

* Official website
* Business data for Fastly, Inc.:

* Google
* SEC filings
* Yahoo!

* v
* t
* e

Glitch

Products|

* FogBugz (acquired by DevFactory)
* CityDesk (discontinued)

Spin-off companies|

* Stack Exchange (sold to Prosus)
* Trello (sold to Atlassian)

People|

* Joel Spolsky
* Jeff Atwood
* Anil Dash

Parent company|

* Fastly (since 2022)

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