Built to Stay On: How Lightcast Keeps Your Streams Online

From November 2025 to October 2026, the Lightcast MEDIA CLOUD had 0.8 hours of downtime: 48 minutes in total, or 99.99% uptime, by far the highest uptime in the entire industry. Our CDN partners Fastly and Gcore had collective downtimes of under 4 hours within the past 12 months. In the same 12 months, the biggest cloud providers each lost between 12 and 81 hours to major outages.

When a live stream or VOD library goes dark, viewers leave and revenue stops. This issue shows how Lightcast compares with the providers much of the internet runs on, and how we keep your downtime low.

How Lightcast compares

(Sources: Provider postmortems, status pages and outage trackers; Lightcast figure from Lightcast records · Nov 2025 – Oct 2026)
The eight providers averaged 22.9 hours of downtime, nearly 29 times Lightcast's 0.8. The CDN figures marked with an asterisk are single incidents; Lightcast's 0.8 hours is the full-year total.

Major outage downtime of largest cloud & CDN providers in 2026

Hours of downtime across the major incidents identified for each provider

*Akamai, Fastly, and Gcore had no major global outage; bars show one example incident each (Gcore: Apr 7, 2026 DDoS-triggered multi-service outage). Averages are across all 7 providers.
Excludes AWS Middle East regions (disrupted since Mar 2026, ongoing) and incidents with no published duration.
(Sources: provider postmortems, status pages and trackers (IsDown, Pingoru, UptimeRobot, IncidentHub)

Why the big clouds went down

Most of the year's big outages came from a physical failure (power, cooling, or a cut fiber) or a single configuration change. Because so many services share the same providers, one fault took hundreds of them offline at once.

How we keep downtime low

Lightcast runs on its own infrastructure, largely siloed off from the big-tech cloud providers, and pairs it with the two CDNs that had the least downtime in our comparison. With few shared dependencies, a failure somewhere else doesn't take your streams down with it.

A private MEDIA CLOUD, apart from big tech. The MEDIA CLOUD runs on Lightcast's private cloud infrastructure, largely separate from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Their outages this year, including AWS's 28-hour failure in Northern Virginia, were outside our blast radius.

• Separate CDNs for live and VOD. Live is delivered by Gcore and VOD by Fastly, two independent networks, so a problem at one doesn't reach the other. Neither had a major global outage this year; their largest incidents lasted 1.4 and 1.7 hours.
• Backup streams for live. Your encoder sends a primary and a backup stream (RTMP or SRT) into Gcore's points of presence, so losing one stream or one entry point doesn't stop the broadcast.
• No single point under everything. No one cloud, CDN, or region sits beneath every layer, so a fault stays contained to the layer where it happens.

The result: an issue at one CDN touches either live or VOD, not both, and the MEDIA CLOUD stays clear of big-tech outages.

(Source: Lightcast live and VOD processing & delivery paths - 4 layers, 2 CDNs)

What this means for you

Live is delivered through Gcore, VOD through Fastly; both reach your viewers on infrastructure independent from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Your live events, your VOD library, and your apps stay reachable while much of the internet waits for a big cloud to recover.

Questions about your setup, or about adding backup streams to your live workflow?

Contact Customer Support or your Lightcast account manager.