Fastly acquires Glitch, the web coding service formerly called Fog Creek Software; Glitch CEO Anil Dash will join Fastly as its VP of developer experience
it's a super tough business to be in with plenty of dead startups, but they built something special so I hope they can continue to exist! https://twitter.com/... Mike Masnick / @mmasnick : Interesting news... hoping this actually leads to more growth for Glitch, rather than putting it on course for eventual closure... https://twitter.com/... @kyliebytes : Fastly bought Glitch. I sat down with @anildash yesterday when I heard the news. “Five years ago, people told me I was nuts. It was like, ‘the web is dead.’ And I'm like, I don't think so. I think people wanna make s—t online for their friends,” he said. https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Jesse von Doom / @jessevondoom : One of the best parts of working at @glitch is the the people I get to work with. Their drive, kindness, care, and vision. Working with @fastly I've seen the same in their people, and I'm so excited for the things we get to build together. This is going to be really good. https://twitter.com/... Fintan Ryan / @fintanr : Really interesting acquisition by @fastly. Congrats to @anildash & the entire @glitch team. https://twitter.com/... @threepointone : Very cool, feels like a win for both parties. Congrats to all! https://twitter.com/... Jenn / @jennschiffer : i've been so busy working with some really amazing folks at @fastly to make this happen, i never came up with what i should say once this news was live! i'm excited, hopeful, and energized to bring our awesome community who means so much to us all into this next chapter. 💜 https://twitter.com/... Rahul Ganjoo / @elegantlywasted : Woah - some of the OGs getting back together 🙌🏻🙌🏻 https://twitter.com/... Simon Willison / @simonw : I guess this means Datasette runs on a Fastly now! https://docs.datasette.io/... https://twitter.com/... @anildash : I think when I was talking to @jake_k, I said Fastly's new platform is “cool as shit”. Obviously, I uh... am still learning how to communicate as an executive at a respected publicly traded company. 😬 But it's true, tho! https://www.theverge.com/... @anildash : And I'm thrilled to say the *entire* Glitch team is coming over to Fastly — plus we'll be hiring, so come join us and help make Glitch even better! There are details in our blog post, including how we'll be helping bring Fastly's tech to every developer: https://blog.glitch.com/... Paul Ford / @ftrain : Word on the street...this was an all-cache deal... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Fastly, the CDN provider behind Reddit, GitHub, and Stripe, is buying Glitch — the former Fog Creek Software — and installing CEO Anil Dash as its VP of developer experience. The move hands Fastly a community that had already built more than 2.5M web apps on Glitch's collaboration platform, turning a standalone service into an on-ramp for Fastly's edge business.
Dash framed the deal against years of 'the web is dead' skepticism, arguing people still want to build things online for each other. The open question raised by observers at the time — whether corporate ownership would nurture or smother that community — is exactly what later coverage tests.
First-order effects
- Anil Dash moves from Glitch CEO to Fastly VP of developer experience, taking the Glitch team with him and putting a community-coding product inside a CDN company's roadmap.
- Fastly gains a developer-facing brand and funnel at the exact layer where its paying customers — API-heavy sites like GitHub and Stripe — already live.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in web deployment tooling face the same squeeze: Netlify's acquisition of Gatsby shows consolidation hitting independent web-dev platforms from both ends, pressuring remaining standalone services on pricing and survival.
- For Fastly, developer goodwill becomes a competitive asset against other edge and CDN providers courting the same build-on-the-edge audience.
Third-order effects
- The pattern's endpoint is visible in hindsight: by 2025 Dash announced Glitch would stop hosting projects and close user profiles, suggesting acquisitions like this function primarily as talent-and-community absorptions whose hosted services rarely survive inside infrastructure companies.
- If free-tier creative-coding communities keep getting absorbed and then sunset, developers lose neutral playgrounds and migrate toward tools owned by the infrastructure vendors they may eventually buy from — narrowing where experimental web work happens.
The trend: Infrastructure providers are acquiring developer-community platforms as funnels for their core businesses, but the hosted services themselves tend to be wound down once the talent lands.