David Belson
Sr. Director, Data Insights, Fastly
David Belson is Fastly’s Senior Director of Data Insights, responsible for developing planned and opportunistic data-driven stories, as well as working across the organization to activate these data insights for customers and the open source community. Over the last 25+ years, he has held similar roles and implemented similar programs at organizations including the Internet Society, Oracle’s Internet Intelligence team, and Akamai Technologies.
Fastly's 2021 in Review
In this post, we’ll take a look back at the past year through the eyes of our edge cloud network to explore what we saw across new protocol adoption, security initiatives, network growth, and more.
Cyber Five 2021: new normal or back to before times?
We analyzed traffic from Thanksgiving Thursday to Cyber Monday in order to understand the traffic, buying, and security trends of ecommerce's big week.
Going offline: internet disruptions we saw in Q3 2021
It’s important for companies and end users to monitor and understand internet outages so they can spot patterns, understand trends, and help mitigate disruptions. At Fastly, we monitor these disruptions and share them transparently with our community. These are the worldwide incidents we saw in the third quarter of 2021.
Who Takes the Gold in the Fastly Games?
The Fastly Games compare countries in four data-driven events based on aggregated network traffic: IPv6 adoption, HTTP versions, operating system (OS) versions, and browser versions.
Talking traffic: internet disruptions we saw in Q2 2021
During the second quarter of 2021, a number of internet disruptions were observed around the world for a variety of planned and unplanned reasons. Here’s what we saw.
Impact of mobile internet disruption in Niger
In this blog post, we look at the impact of the internet service disruption in Niger from the perspective of Fastly platform traffic at a country, city, and network level.
COVID boosts traffic across industries | Fastly
Increased internet usage due to COVID-19 drove a ‘COVID bump’ in traffic across certain industry verticals, including digital media publishing, education, and social media.
Traffic patterns and user behaviors from Super Bowl LV
This year, Fastly joined multi-vendor tech stacks to help stream the Super Bowl for multiple digital media customers, providing us with a unique perspective of online behavior during the game. Across our network, we also observed traffic trends for social media, meme creation and sharing, and online retail.
More than Bernie memes: what we saw during Inauguration Day
The inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was unique for many reasons, not the least of which was the lack of crowds due to the COVID-19 pandemic and increased security measures. Fastly analyzed aggregate Requests per Second (RPS) traffic on Fastly’s platform for customer cohorts across social media, digital media, meme, and other verticals.
Cyber Five: what we saw during ecommerce's big week
Ads leading up to the annual Black Friday - Cyber Monday holiday shopping weekend this year were remarkably devoid of the promises of “doorbuster” sales at the local malls and big-box stores. Instead, retailers moved their promotions to their ecommerce sites. With the weekend now in our rear-view mirror, we examine aggregate traffic volumes for 100 of Fastly’s top U.S. based ecommerce customers.
Fastly's Live Event Services power Lexus Melbourne Cup on 10 Play | Fastly
Fastly Live Event Services helped power the Lexus Melbourne Cup, a 3-minute horse race that attracts millions of viewers across Australia. This year, the event saw more people live streaming than ever before and went off without a hitch.
Election 2020: A data story in three parts
The breadth of our network and volume of our traffic provides a portal of sorts into the global zeitgeist, helping us observe the moments the world goes online to share in a collective experience. But unlike the Super Bowl or Black Friday, we can hardly call the 2020 U.S. presidential election a “moment”. Indeed, our view of the 2020 Election starts months before Election Day and continues days after.
