Case Study: Mastodon achieves scalable DDoS protection and faster global performance with Fastly

Mastodon scales and protects social media app servers to meet unprecedented surge in demand

Mastodon, the ad-free open-source social network, faced a sudden surge in demand after millions of users left Twitter, along with real DDoS attacks and severe traffic spikes that overwhelmed mastodon.social’s Ruby on Rails infrastructure. Mastodon brought in Fastly to help protect and scale its platform as the network expanded rapidly.

Fastly implemented its CDN and caching layer in front of Mastodon’s infrastructure to intercept attacks, cache content and API calls, and reduce load on origin servers. The results were significant: Fastly stopped a major DDoS attack in under 30 minutes, now serves 60% of API traffic from cache, reduced origin egress by 75%, and improved global response times with sub-second configuration changes and purges.

Mastodon

Renaud Chaput

Chief Technology Officer