Fastly is an edge cloud platform providing content delivery, edge computing, security, and streaming services for some of the internet's largest properties. Fastly's network spans 90+ points of presence globally, serving companies like The New York Times, GitHub, Stripe, and Pinterest. Unlike traditional CDNs, Fastly offers programmable edge computing through Compute@Edge (now Fastly Compute) using WebAssembly, real-time log streaming, instant cache purging, and a VCL-based configuration language. Fastly processes millions of requests per second with sub-millisecond purge propagation.
Fastly outages have historically caused some of the most dramatic internet-wide disruptions. The June 2021 outage took down major websites globally due to a software bug triggered by a single customer configuration change. Common causes include edge configuration deployment errors that propagate across the CDN, BGP routing changes affecting network reachability, TLS certificate management issues, and origin shield failures that cause cache miss storms hitting origin servers. Fastly's instant purge capability means configuration errors propagate globally within seconds.
When Fastly goes down, major websites and APIs return 503 errors simultaneously because Fastly sits between users and origin servers. News sites, e-commerce platforms, streaming services, and API providers all behind Fastly become unreachable. Unlike origin server outages that affect individual properties, a Fastly outage takes down thousands of unrelated websites at once. The June 2021 incident demonstrated how a single CDN failure can effectively break a significant portion of the internet.
Use this page to check Fastly availability. Fastly outages can take down thousands of major websites simultaneously because it serves as a reverse proxy CDN. Check status.fastly.com for official incident reports. If many unrelated websites are returning 503 errors at the same time, a CDN-level outage like Fastly is a likely cause.
Fastly operates as a reverse proxy between users and origin servers. When Fastly is down, requests never reach the origin servers even if they are perfectly healthy. Major properties like GitHub, Stripe, and major news outlets use Fastly, so an outage creates the appearance of a massive internet failure across unrelated services.
A software bug in Fastly's configuration system was triggered by a single customer's valid configuration change. The bug caused 85% of Fastly's network to return errors, taking down major websites globally for approximately one hour. The incident highlighted how CDN-level single points of failure can cascade across the internet. Fastly has since implemented safeguards against similar failures.
Implement multi-CDN failover using DNS-based traffic steering that routes around Fastly during outages. Configure your origin servers to serve traffic directly as a fallback. Use health checks to detect Fastly failures and automatically switch to backup CDN or direct-to-origin configurations. Monitor from outside Fastly's network with PinusX.
Monitor your Fastly-fronted domains with PinusX Uptime Monitor for free. External monitoring checks from outside the CDN network detect Fastly failures that internal monitoring might miss. Get Slack and email alerts within 60 seconds so you can activate failover procedures before users report widespread errors.
Monitor Fastly uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.