"Set the CDN and forget it" cost a launch

"Set the CDN and forget it" cost a launch
A Seoul gaming studio configured their CDN once at launch and never watched it again, believing edge config is fire-and-forget. Six months later a patch download felt sluggish across Asia.
The myth: configure once, walk away. The reality: a routing change at their provider had quietly started sending Seoul traffic to a Tokyo PoP with a degraded link. Nobody noticed because nobody looked.
What we changed: we set up synthetic checks from 8 cities and a RUM alert on regional p95. The misrouute surfaced in an hour, and a quick traffic-steering rule pinned Seoul to the correct PoP.
Result: Seoul download throughput recovered from 8 MB/s to 45 MB/s, and we now catch regional drift the day it happens.
Edge networks drift. Watch them by region or pay later.
The number that mattered: 45 MB/s Seoul throughput, recovered from 8.