Case Study: WIRED achieves real-time control and faster page loads with Fastly

Wired - Customer Case Study

WIRED, the technology magazine reaching over 30 million people monthly, redesigned WIRED.com to be more visual and real-time, but ran up against limitations of their previous CDN: slow configuration changes, 503s during high-traffic events, and insufficient control over caching for frequently changing editorial content. They needed a solution that let editors deploy updates instantly, keep page loads fast worldwide, and reliably handle traffic spikes from live coverage.

Fastly gave WIRED granular, real-time control (custom VCL, instant config changes, surrogate keys) plus caching features like stale-while-revalidate and request collapsing and hands-on support during the launch. The result was significantly faster page loads, a smooth site relaunch, reduced origin load, and the ability to serve live, frequently updated content (e.g., the Apple Watch live blog with a 15-second TTL) from the edge without errors — improving global performance and reader engagement.

WIRED

Kathleen Vignos

Director of Engineering