CDN purge delays serve stale content

CDN purge delays serve stale content

Cache purges take longer than you think—here’s how edge nodes delay updates and what to do when subscribers see yesterday’s post.

You hit publish at 9:03am, fired the cache purge from your hosting dashboard, and watched the confirmation message fade. Three minutes later a subscriber replies to say your featured image is still showing last week’s header.

The purge command reached the origin server instantly—but the two hundred edge nodes scattered across four continents are still serving cached copies, and the refresh clock runs on their schedule, not yours.

Tomorrow’s premium edition walks through why CDN cache purges don’t propagate as fast as the dashboard implies, how long individual edge nodes actually take to refresh, and the exact steps to take when readers keep seeing stale content even after you’ve cleared the cache twice.

You’ll see the delay math for the five largest CDN providers, the difference between purge-by-URL and purge-all commands, and the one monitoring trick that tells you which geographic region is still serving yesterday’s version.

Read the full edition

Tomorrow’s premium edition covers CDN purge propagation delays, edge node refresh timing across major providers, and the monitoring setup that shows you exactly which regions are still serving stale content.

Cache purges take time—now you’ll know how much.
The One Two Three Send Team

PS: Tomorrow’s edition includes the purge-by-URL versus purge-all speed comparison your dashboard doesn’t show.