The “edge cloud platform” Fastly went down on Tuesday, which means that thousands of major websites across the internet did, too. We don’t often think of the internet as existing in a physical sense, stored in the whirring server rooms of a handful of companies around the world, but many were forced to when the outage knocked out heavily-trafficked sites like The New York Times, PayPal, Reddit, and Slack for a few hours early Tuesday morning.
People are likely more familiar with the websites hosted by Fastly than with Fastly itself, but Tuesday’s hiccup gave its name recognition a significant boost. Its Twitter follower count shot up 20% overnight, bringing its total following up to 24,310 according to Thinknum data.
In a blog post Tuesday, Fastly blamed the outage on a software bug, and said it was able to restore service 49 minutes later. The quick recovery also seems to have instilled some investor confidence, as Fastly’s stock rose by nearly $10 on Tuesday after services resumed.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online, jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings, and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.