July 2026 Summaries

Fastly Fiddle is a web-based tool that allows users to compile and execute Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) on real Fastly edge nodes, providing a unique opportunity to test and debug VCL code using actual production infrastructure. It is particularly useful for both humans and coding agents, offering a sandbox environment where VCL can be tested for real-world behavior, such as geolocation data, cache clustering, and rate limiting. The tool supports exploration and debugging by providing detailed execution feedback and a shareable URL for collaboration, while also enabling agents to verify their generated VCL through a stable, albeit undocumented, API. Fiddle complements local development tools by serving as an "outer loop" resource for testing VCL against real edge conditions, making it invaluable for resolving customer issues, exploring unfamiliar features, and ensuring generated VCL functions as intended.

The blog post delves into the practical application of the x402 protocol, initially discussed in a theoretical context, which enables automated HTTP-native payment challenges using the longstanding yet underutilized 402 Payment Required status code. By demonstrating a simple application built on Fastly Compute, the article illustrates how payment can be enforced at the edge before requests reach the origin, ensuring that only verified x402 payments allow access to protected resources. This approach is particularly relevant as the landscape of commerce evolves to include agent-based transactions, where an agent, device, or service might autonomously pay for API calls or premium data access. The demo underscores the potential of Fastly Compute to act as a programmable enforcement point, while the x402 protocol facilitates a seamless payment flow without necessitating a traditional checkout process. It employs test wallets and stablecoin on a test network to simulate the payment transaction, emphasizing the simplicity and fail-safe nature of the x402 flow, which blocks unverified requests with a 402 status and only serves content after payment verification. This model opens avenues for various practical applications such as charging for API endpoints, facilitating agent-to-service transactions, or protecting origins from unpaid traffic, while encouraging further exploration and implementation of automated payment mechanisms on the web.

Google's recent proposal to publishers, which involves granting broad rights for AI content use or losing payments from its Showcase program, has inadvertently given publishers newfound clarity and leverage in negotiations. This comes at a time when search referral traffic to publishers has significantly decreased, with Google search traffic to publishers dropping 33% globally in 2025, and even more for smaller sites. While AI platforms currently account for only around 1% of publisher traffic, publishers are now presented with the challenge of gauging the value of their content in an evolving digital landscape. Google's slower approach compared to competitors in securing formal content deals has given publishers more opportunities to compare and better position themselves in negotiations. To maximize their leverage, publishers are encouraged to understand how their content is accessed and used by AI systems, employing infrastructure solutions like Fastly's partnerships with ScalePost and TollBit to measure and monetize AI access. This shift signals the end of passive content access in exchange for referral traffic, pushing publishers to develop systems that clearly define their content's value and enforce access terms, potentially leading to more sustainable models beyond traditional platform dependence.

Spain's thrilling victory over Argentina in the 2026 World Cup final highlighted both the exhilaration of the event and the technical challenges of broadcasting to an expected 1.8 billion global viewers. Fastly's Edge Cloud Platform played a crucial role in maintaining stream integrity under massive traffic surges, providing more than just scalability and speed; it offered advanced security measures against threats like DDoS attacks and piracy, which have evolved with the rise of AI. The company collaborated closely with customers to counteract piracy and bot threats during the event, employing a layered defense strategy that distinguished legitimate viewers from malicious actors. Data from the tournament revealed that the final saw nearly double the traffic of the third-place match, with viewership unexpectedly increasing during extra time, indicating an unmet demand for high-stakes football. The quarter-finals and semi-finals also demonstrated how the knockout stage's high stakes drove consistent audience retention, with lower halftime log-off rates compared to earlier rounds. Fastly's performance during the World Cup exemplifies the importance of technological innovation, preparation, and partnership in delivering seamless live streaming experiences for major events.

Every four years, the FIFA World Cup captivates global attention, and at Fastly, this phenomenon is observed through the unique lens of network traffic data. As the tournament unfolds, the company's platform reveals fascinating insights into human behavior and cultural diversity in the U.S. by analyzing data flows and bandwidth consumption across its Points of Presence (PoPs). For instance, during the U.S. match against Australia, streaming traffic surged by 93% compared to a pre-World Cup baseline week, with unexpected spikes in cities like Palo Alto and Vancouver. Similarly, Portugal's match against the Democratic Republic of Congo saw significant increases in traffic through Miami and Los Angeles, and when Cabo Verde played Saudi Arabia, social media bandwidth notably increased in Phoenix and Dallas. These patterns of data movement not only reflect the technical demands on Fastly's infrastructure but also underscore the shared global experience and cultural passion fans bring to the World Cup, illustrating the company's role in delivering these moments of connection and celebration.

Media over QUIC (MoQ), created by Luke Curley, is a protocol designed to address latency issues prevalent in traditional live streaming methods like HLS/DASH by allowing for more interactive and lower-latency streams. While traditional methods focus on maintaining high-quality streams by buffering content, MoQ prioritizes newer content over older content, enabling users to experience live events more interactively and in real-time, even if it might compromise some quality. This approach is particularly beneficial for applications such as live sports, where immediacy is often more valuable than perfect picture quality. MoQ is also versatile enough to be used beyond media streaming, finding applications in controlling drones and managing data streams for robots, where it efficiently handles varying bandwidths by queuing and backfilling content to ensure minimal data loss. MoQ's infrastructure allows for scalable distribution of live feeds, such as those from multiple cameras around a race track, by utilizing moq-relay proxies that form clusters to efficiently route and distribute content. This makes it an attractive solution for live event broadcasting, ensuring a single feed can be distributed to potentially infinite viewers with minimal strain on network resources.

Fastly has introduced a new request handoff functionality in version 0.13.0 of its Rust SDK, designed to enhance efficiency by reducing CPU usage and wall clock time for customers. The updated pricing model now focuses solely on requests and vCPU consumption, incentivizing customers to write more efficient code. The new feature addresses the need for supporting long-running backend requests by allowing asynchronous handoff from Wasm guests to the host, which continues to process requests independently, freeing up resources and improving request-per-second (RPS) throughput. This is particularly beneficial for computationally intensive tasks like AI gateways and long-running uploads, reducing the impact of slow or non-responsive backends on edge services. Additionally, it offers the ability to modify headers on eventual responses, helping manage heavy computational loads with better resource allocation and error handling. The functionality is currently available for testing in Viceroy, Fastly's local environment, with plans to expand it to other SDKs.

In the World Cup knockout stages, where every match must have a winner, viewership patterns become more pronounced compared to the group stage. The elimination of draws and the high stakes of each match lead to heightened interest, providing a clearer view of audience behavior. The knockout rounds introduce extra time and penalty shootouts as new decision points, which tend to draw significant traffic spikes, reinforcing the "you need to see this" effect observed in close matches. Despite the increased pressure and win-or-go-home stakes, halftime behavior remains consistent, indicating that audience habits during breaks are more about routine than the match's status. The data, drawn from global traffic on the Fastly platform, suggests that while geographic location influences audience size, it doesn't alter viewing behavior. Close matches and dramatic finishes continue to capture the most attention, with the potential for upsets and marquee players like Ronaldo also contributing to viewership spikes. The tournament's progression will likely further illuminate these patterns, especially with the introduction of extra time and shootouts as significant viewership drivers.

As organizations increasingly incorporate AI agents and agentic workflows, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are becoming critical for integrating AI models with enterprise systems, yet they introduce complex security challenges. Unlike traditional API traffic, MCP traffic involves dynamic tool discovery and interactions across trust boundaries, expanding the attack surface and necessitating advanced security measures. Fastly responded to these challenges by developing a security prototype for a global publisher's MCP server, meeting key requirements such as detecting AI-specific attack vectors, ensuring production-scale performance, and allowing complex authentication. The prototype utilizes Fastly's global network, bot management, next-gen WAF, and media shield to implement custom traffic logic, block unwanted automation clients, mitigate OWASP and AI-specific attacks, and reduce origin load. The 10-week trial of this solution exceeded desired metrics, achieving sub-50ms latency and 500MB+ payload capacity without timeouts, proving effective in securing the publisher's AI infrastructure while maintaining performance. Fastly's platform offers programmable security and real-time visibility, enabling organizations to adopt AI technologies with confidence and reduced risk.

Fastly is addressing the challenge of accurately measuring and reducing digital carbon footprints in the media industry by joining DIMPACT, a coalition aimed at enhancing environmental transparency and sustainability. While data center and user device emissions are quantifiable, network delivery emissions have traditionally been estimated through industry averages, complicating precise reporting. Fastly's involvement in DIMPACT and its Sustainability Dashboard are designed to provide actionable insights for companies to understand and optimize their digital footprints, particularly in Scope 3 emissions reporting. The company's commitment to 100% renewable electricity for its global points of presence and its focus on software efficiency—through methods like Request Collapsing and localized data processing—aim to ensure that increased edge workloads align with emission reduction targets. By collaborating with industry leaders, Fastly seeks to promote a more efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally conscious digital media sector.

Fastly has been recognized as a Customers' Choice in the 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Edge Distribution Platforms report, achieving a 95% willingness-to-recommend score and an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 92 reviews. Customers praised Fastly for its fast, reliable, and secure platform, highlighting its effective security controls and real-time updates, which are particularly beneficial for industries such as banking, travel, hospitality, and media. Fastly received high ratings in all measured categories, including Product Capabilities, Sales Experience, Deployment Experience, and Support Experience, reflecting its commitment to innovation and customer success. The company acknowledges the importance of customer feedback in shaping its products and aims to continue enhancing digital experiences at the edge.

AI agents are increasingly taking on roles traditionally handled by humans in online commerce, such as searching, comparing, recommending, negotiating, and completing transactions, which introduces a new dimension to ecommerce termed "agentic commerce." This shift necessitates a reevaluation of web protocols to accommodate AI-driven transactions, requiring standardized methods for expressing intent, identity, authorization, and payment. Unlike machine-to-machine payments, which involve straightforward transactions between systems, agentic commerce encompasses a broader scope, including understanding user preferences and managing the entire shopping journey. The evolution of agentic commerce could transform ecommerce by shifting the shopping process to automated layers, reducing direct consumer interaction with merchant sites and challenging traditional methods of building brand loyalty. Edge computing is positioned as a critical enforcement point to manage agent-driven transactions by verifying identity, authorization, and payment, ensuring compliance, and preventing fraud before requests reach the origin. Several protocols are emerging to support this ecosystem, such as the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which aim to streamline AI interactions with commerce systems. Payment and authorization protocols like Visa's TAP and Mastercard's Agent Pay are also being developed to ensure secure and authenticated transactions. As the agentic commerce ecosystem continues to take shape, edge platforms like Fastly are adapting to provide the necessary infrastructure to support these new traffic patterns, enabling merchants to maintain control and deliver seamless customer experiences.