Fastly Purge Not Working (Old Content Still Served)

How to fix it

Try these in order — the most common fix is first.

1. 1. Purge twice

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   1. Run the purge
   2. Run it again: about 2 seconds later for URL or surrogate key purges, about 30 seconds later for purge all
   Did this fix it? Yes No

2. 2. Stop stale content being re-cached at the shield

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   1. In VCL, on shield POPs (fastly.ff.visits_this_service > 0) set req.max_stale_while_revalidate = 0s
   2. Also set req.max_stale_if_error to 0s if you do not want stale content when the origin is down
   Did this fix it? Yes No

3. 3. Use the right purge type

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   1. URL purges invalidate all variants of an object
   2. Surrogate key purges only invalidate objects tagged with that key
   3. Purge all removes everything in the service, including versioned assets
   Did this fix it? Yes No

4. 4. Authenticate API purges

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   1. Send your API token in the Fastly-Key header over HTTPS
   2. A successful purge returns status ok and an id
   3. If authentication is required on the service, create a request header Fastly-Purge-Requires-Auth set to 1
   Did this fix it? Yes No

5. 5. Avoid purging assets

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   1. Publish scripts, styles and images at new versioned URLs
   2. Serve them with Cache-Control: max-age=31556952, immutable
   Did this fix it? Yes No

Symptoms

You purged a URL or all content but visitors still see the old version.

Why it happens

• With shielding, the edge cache is purged first and then refetches unpurged content from the shield
• Soft purge with serve-stale lets a shield pass stale content that the edge caches as fresh
• Purge by URL does not match a variant tagged by surrogate key (and the reverse)
• URL purge authentication is enabled and the API token header is missing
• Browser or other caches hold the old file

This guide also covers

• fastly purge not working
• fastly cache not purging
• fastly purge not clearing cache
• fastly soft purge

Other Fastly errors

• Fastly Error: Unknown Domain
• Fastly 503 Backend Read Error / Connection Timeout
• Fastly TLS Certificate Stuck Pending or Not Provisioning
• Fastly Origin TLS Errors: Hostname Mismatch, Unable to Verify Certificate
• Fastly Not Caching: Always X-Cache MISS
• Fastly Serves Wrong Content or Denies Requests From Origin (Override Host)
• How to Cancel Fastly Account