Case Study: USA TODAY Co. cuts bandwidth over 50% during the 2024 elections with Fastly
Key results
The challenge
During the high-traffic 2024 election period, USA TODAY Co. faced aggressive malicious traffic that risked overwhelming origin infrastructure and driving up bandwidth and cloud-storage costs, while user experience had to stay uninterrupted.
The solution
The team deployed Fastly CDN, Compute, Next-Gen WAF, and Bot Management - building an API gateway on top of Fastly CDN - to block bots and rate-limit harmful traffic.
“Fastly's security solutions greatly protect us from malicious attacks and also protect our origin from excessive traffic, without impacting customer experience.”
YNYanyan NiPrincipal Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering, USA TODAY Co.
The results, in context
Bandwidth usage dropped more than 50% compared to peak levels during the 2024 elections, and cloud storage fell to 20% of peak usage, driving cost savings while keeping user traffic stable and uninterrupted.