On June 8, 2021, one Fastly customer changed a setting, and a large slice of the internet went dark. News sites, shops and government pages returned errors at once. That outage showed how much of the web ran through a company most readers had never heard of. Two years earlier, Fastly had gone public as a challenger in content delivery, selling speed and control to developers at sites that could not afford to be slow.

A Wikia Engineer's Edge

Artur Bergman founded Fastly in San Francisco in 2011. He had been chief technical officer at Wikia, a busy wiki host, and knew the pain of serving pages fast at scale. The bet was that developers wanted a delivery network they could program and update in seconds. Fastly placed servers at the edge of the network, close to readers. Customers paid by how much traffic they sent through it.

Forty-Nine Minutes

Fastly priced 11.25 million shares at $16 on May 16, 2019. It opened on the NYSE the next day and closed at $23.99, up about 50 percent. In February 2020 Bergman handed the chief executive job to Joshua Bixby. The 2021 outage hit 85 percent of the network, and Fastly had 95 percent running normally within 49 minutes. Todd Nightingale, a Cisco executive, became chief executive in September 2022. Fastly still trades on the NYSE as FSLY.

Cover: Falcon Perched on a Tree, Isoda Koryusai. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a falcon (speed at the edge).