Shares of cloud-computing company Fastly are up more than 12 percent since the company’s high-profile glitch took down many of the world’s most popular websites yesterday morning.
For about an hour on Tuesday, many internet users were unable to access Google, Reddit, Twitter, Spotify and thousands of other sites due to an outage at Fastly. Websites for the New York Times, CNN and the BBC were also down.
Fastly, which blamed Tuesday’s outage on a software bug that was triggered when a customer changed settings, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The outage means that Fastly could lose high-profile customers to competitors like Amazon and Google and may even face legal trouble, according to tech analyst and Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives.
“It was a nightmare outage,” Ives told The Post. “There could be some legal issues. This is not the PR that any data center player wants to have.”
Yet the company’s stock has only benefited. Fastly shares were trading at $56.20 on Wednesday morning — off nearly 0.5 percent from the previous day’s close but up more than 12 percent from $49.91 on Tuesday morning when news of the outage broke. The stock is up 33 percent over the past month, but still far below an all-time peak of more than $125 in October 2020.
Ives attributed the stock’s perplexing progress this week to retail traders, who have a tendency to jump on any company that is grabbing headlines — regardless of whether the news is good or bad.
“This is more retail-driven than institutional because any institutional investor is definitely going to take a step back,” he said.
As of Wednesday morning, Fastly was the number-one most-discussed stock over the past 24 hours on Reddit’s r/stocks forum, which boasts 2.7 million members, according to the Reddit analytics tracker yolostocks.live.
However, Fastly did not crack the top 10 most-discussed stocks on the larger r/WallStreetBets forum, according to the tracker.