Case Study: Upworthy achieves instant content updates and faster, scalable performance with Fastly

Upworthy - Customer Case Study

Upworthy is a media site that curates and shares compelling stories to drive attention to important topics, reaching around 50 million people per month (Dec 2014). As viral articles drove massive, unpredictable spikes in traffic, the team needed a transparent, customizable CDN that would let them publish updates in real time, shield their origin, and improve mobile performance while scaling cost-effectively.

They moved to Fastly, using instant purge, surrogate keys, custom VCL, Origin Shield, and real-time log streaming to deploy updates in milliseconds, protect origin servers, and monitor site health. The switch cut dyno usage in half, eliminated significant downtime, reduced miss latency from 5–10 seconds to well below 1 second, improved mobile load times, and enabled a leaner, more resilient delivery stack.

Upworthy

Ryan Resella

Senior Engineer