Case Study: Imgur achieves massive image scale and reduced origin load with Fastly

How online image hosting service Imgur uses Fastly to serve nearly 2 billion images, including 1.5 million new images, every day

Imgur is a leading image-sharing platform with about 130 million users, 5 billion monthly pageviews and over a million images uploaded daily. To serve billions of images and heavy API traffic without overloading origin servers, Imgur needed a CDN that would integrate with its Varnish-based stack and allow rapid, self‑served configuration changes at the edge.

Fastly — built on Varnish — enabled Imgur to push custom VCL to edge servers, cache both static assets and dynamic API calls (e.g., 60s for logged-out users, 1s for logged-in), and deploy or roll back config changes instantly. As a result Imgur serves nearly 2 billion images daily, handles thousands to tens of thousands of requests per second (API ≈8,000/s with peaks around 40,000/s), dramatically reduced origin traffic, improved mobile performance, and gained real-time visibility into site metrics.

Imgur

Alan Schaaf

Founder & CEO