Case Study: The Guardian achieves real-time breaking-news updates and scalable global performance with Fastly

The Guardian - Customer Case Study

The Guardian is an independent global news publisher reaching nearly 100 million unique visitors per month that adopted a “digital first” strategy and runs US, UK and Australian editions. Faced with the need for real-time control, visibility, and rapid scalability to support breaking news and unpredictable traffic spikes, the Guardian wanted a CDN they could self‑provision and fine‑tune without losing control of edge logic or editorial confidence in instant content updates.

Fastly delivered that control through Custom VCL, a programmable API, real‑time log streaming and instant purges (removing cached content in ~150 ms), while caching dynamic HTML and API responses at the edge. The result was faster deploys and tighter CI integration, automatic shielding of origin servers during surges (e.g., traffic jumping from ~400 to 1,000+ rps), a ~20% improvement in time‑to‑first‑byte, and reliable, globally consistent performance with editorial teams confident content updates appear in milliseconds.

The Guardian

Matthew O'Brien

Software Architect