Is Fastly Down? How to Check CDN Status in 2026

Fastly is one of the world's most powerful edge cloud platforms, trusted by Shopify, GitHub, Reddit, Stripe, Vimeo, and hundreds of other high-traffic applications. Unlike traditional CDNs, Fastly offers programmable edge computing (Compute@Edge), instant cache purging, and advanced VCL routing. When Fastly goes down, the impact is disproportionately large — a single Fastly outage can simultaneously affect thousands of websites and APIs.

How to Check if Fastly is Down

1. Official Fastly Status Page

Fastly's status page at status.fastly.com shows operational status for each Point of Presence (PoP) globally. During an incident, check whether the outage is limited to specific PoPs (regional) or is a global event. Regional outages affect only traffic routed through those PoPs.

2. Test Fastly API Directly

# Check Fastly API availability
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  https://api.fastly.com/stats/regions
# Returns 200 if Fastly API is operational (even without auth)

# Check if YOUR service is being served by Fastly
curl -sI https://your-domain.com | grep -i "x-served-by\|x-fastly\|fastly-"
# Fastly adds x-served-by: cache-<pop>-<id> header

3. Detect if Traffic is Bypassing Fastly

# Check the response headers for Fastly's signature
curl -sI https://www.example.com | grep -i "x-served-by\|via\|age"

# If x-served-by header is missing, traffic may be hitting origin directly
# or going through a different CDN

4. Check the Fastly Real User Monitoring API

If you have a Fastly account, use the Fastly API to check your service's real-time stats:

# Get recent traffic stats for your service
curl -H "Fastly-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.fastly.com/service/YOUR_SERVICE_ID/stats/summary"

# Check for 503 rate increases indicating cache/origin failures
curl -H "Fastly-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.fastly.com/service/YOUR_SERVICE_ID/stats/field/status_5xx"

What Happened During the 2021 Fastly Outage

The June 8, 2021 Fastly outage is the most significant CDN incident in internet history. Here's what happened:

Building Fastly CDN Fallback Strategies

Given Fastly's outsized impact when it fails, production applications should have fallback strategies:

Option 1: DNS Failover to Origin

Configure low-TTL DNS records that can be quickly switched from Fastly to your origin server during an outage. Services like Route53, Cloudflare, or NS1 support health-check-based automatic DNS failover.

Option 2: Multi-CDN Traffic Splitting

Route a percentage of traffic through a secondary CDN (Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, or Akamai). An intelligent DNS controller can shift all traffic to the secondary CDN if Fastly health checks fail.

Option 3: Fastly VCL Stale Content

# VCL snippet to serve stale content on origin failure
if (beresp.status >= 500 && beresp.status < 600) {
  if (stale.exists) {
    return(deliver_stale);
  }
}

# Enable stale-while-revalidate
set beresp.stale_while_revalidate = 60s;
set beresp.stale_if_error = 86400s; # Serve stale for 24h on errors

Frequently Asked Questions