CDN
Fastly
Fastly is an edge cloud platform for CDN, streaming delivery, and real-time logging, widely used by major media companies and e-commerce sites.
What is Fastly?
Fastly occupies a peculiar place in internet infrastructure: most users have never heard of it, yet it powers the delivery layer for some of the world's most visited websites including GitHub, Reddit, Twitch, the New York Times, The Guardian, and the UK government's GOV.UK. Founded in 2011 with a focus on programmable, real-time CDN capabilities (it was the first CDN to offer Varnish Configuration Language for custom edge logic), Fastly has become the CDN of choice for companies that need more control than commodity CDNs provide. This concentration of high-profile customers made its June 2021 global outage — when a single customer triggered a latent software bug that took down roughly 85% of Fastly's network for about an hour — one of the most significant single-company internet outages in history.
Fastly's edge network spans 75+ data centers globally and its architecture is designed around edge computing — running customer logic (via Compute@Edge) and caching as close to the end user as possible to minimize latency. Its real-time purging capability (which can invalidate cached content globally in under 150 milliseconds) is a key differentiator for news publishers and dynamic content sites. This real-time purge infrastructure, however, requires global coordination across all edge nodes, making it a potential vector for cascading failures if a purge message triggers unintended behavior at scale.
When Fastly has problems, the impact is felt not at Fastly.com but at the customer sites Fastly serves: websites returning 503 "Guru Meditation" errors (Fastly's signature error page), cached content becoming stale beyond its TTL because origin pulls are failing, streaming video on Fastly-powered platforms buffering or stopping entirely, API responses from Fastly-fronted services becoming unavailable, and Fastly's edge compute functions returning 530 errors when the runtime is degraded.
Outage.gg monitors Fastly CDN and network status. Because Fastly outages manifest as failures on dozens of unrelated-looking websites simultaneously, the live status page is often the fastest way to identify that a CDN layer — not the site itself — is the source of a widespread access problem.
Common Fastly Problems
Issues users most frequently report when Fastly is having problems.
Service unavailability
API calls are failing, dashboards are unreachable, or the service is returning 5xx errors.
Slow performance / high latency
Response times are significantly above normal, causing timeouts and degraded user experience.
Authentication failures
API keys, OAuth tokens, or SSO logins are being rejected unexpectedly.
Data sync & storage issues
Files, databases, or synced data are not updating, missing, or inaccessible.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Fastly outages and server status.
You can check the live Fastly server status at outage.gg/services/fastly. The page shows real-time community-submitted outage reports, an hourly trend chart, and the current health status.
Fastly can stop working for a number of reasons including scheduled maintenance windows, unexpected server failures, network infrastructure problems, or DDoS attacks. Check the live status page on Outage.gg for the latest community reports to see if others are experiencing the same issue.
Go to outage.gg/services/fastly and click the "Report an Issue" button. Your report is counted immediately and helps confirm whether a problem is widespread. Reports from multiple users trigger a status change visible to everyone watching the page.
Click the "Notify Me" bell button on the Fastly status page at outage.gg/services/fastly. Create a free account and we will send you an email the moment Fastly comes back online — no app download required.
Many services maintain official status pages with planned maintenance notices. Outage.gg aggregates real-time community-reported outages which often surface faster than official channels.
Related Services
Other services you might be tracking alongside Fastly.
