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Fastly Stock Rises Despite Breaking the Internet
No news is bad news – virtually unknown two days ago, Fastly’s blunder has brought new attention to the company, and with it a major increase in its value.
Despite bringing the internet to a standstill two days ago, cloud computing company Fastly has seen its stock price grow.
A slew of websites, such as Amazon, Reddit, the UK Government website, and numerous others, including DIGIT, all returned ‘503 Service Unavailable’ or ‘connection failure messages’ during the outage.
The blame was soon placed on Fastly. The company operates a content delivery network (CDN), a network of servers that store websites and assets closer to end users – instead of UK users having to communicate with a US website based on a North American server, they can ping one of Fastly’s UK servers for the same content.
When Fastly’s infrastructure went down, users could no longer access its customers’ websites.
However, the outage has done little to affect the company’s fortunes.
At 9:30 on Tuesday June 8th, back when few people had ever heard of Fastly, the company’s stock was around the $49.91 mark.
The hour long-outage then struck, with the company confirming it around 9:58 and saying it had resolved it at 10:44.
Though its shares initially fell, by the time the issue was resolved, the company’s stock had jumped up to $54.11.
Since then, it rose to a peak early on June 9, at $58.97 before falling and plateauing to either side of $55. At its highest, the company added around $600 million to its value, which was estimated at around $6.5 billion.
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While the company said it had resolved the issue, customers reported slower loading speeds and connectivity issues for some hours afterwards.
Ironically, Fastly’s services are designed to prevent outages and increase connection speeds. However, this may be due to companies switching to non-CDN services.
According to the company, an “undiscovered software bug” was to blame for the outage. When a customer made a routine change to their systems, the bug was triggered, crashing 85% of Fastly’s network.
