Case Study: Watch Duty handles massive wildfire traffic spikes with Fastly

Watch Duty handles 100,000 requests per second with Fastly

Watch Duty, a nonprofit providing critical disaster communication, faced the challenge of handling massive, unpredictable traffic spikes during wildfires. Their platform needed to deliver real-time information without downtime, a requirement their previous infrastructure could not support. They partnered with Fastly for its content delivery and caching services to achieve the necessary scalability and reliability.

By implementing Fastly, Watch Duty gained a robust CDN and Next-Gen WAF. The solution dramatically reduced backend traffic with an 85% cache hit rate and successfully handled a historic peak of 100,000 requests per second during the LA wildfires with zero outages. Fastly's infrastructure ensured 100% uptime, blocked malicious scraping, and allowed Watch Duty to focus on its core mission of delivering actionable disaster information.

Watch Duty