What happened
The stock market was having another negative day on Thursday, with the S&P 500 down by about 0.7% as of 12:50 p.m. ET. However, edge computing platform operator Fastly (FSLY -3.35%) was a major outperformer, with shares up by more than 10%.
So what
Fastly announced that it has agreed to acquire coding platform Glitch, which more than 1.8 million developers are using to create and share web apps. The Glitch team plans to form a new Developer Experience team within Fastly that will give users more resources and tools and add to Fastly's offerings.
Image source: Getty Images.
As Glitch CEO Anil Dash said in a press release, "By teaming up with Fastly, we're going to be able to give superpowers to our community of millions of coders and creators and set the stage for them to tap into the huge potential of Fastly's globally distributed edge platform in the future."
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it's clear that Fastly shareholders are glad to see some progress on building out the value of its platform.
Now what
This acquisition is clearly a step in the right direction. Fastly's growth has been sluggish recently, so it's not surprising shareholders are cheering a move that could potentially deliver some growth momentum. After all, the more common scenario when an acquisition is announced is that the acquirer's stock goes down, not up.
However, it's worth pointing out that even after Thursday's move, Fastly is still down by more than 65% year to date, so there's still a long way to go. But this is definitely welcome news.
