<b>Purging 80,000 URLs in one call</b>

<b>Purging 80,000 URLs in one call</b>

A sports news site in Toronto had a deploy problem. When an editor fixed a wrong score, the correction lived on origin instantly, but the CDN kept serving the wrong number for an hour. Their only tool was per-URL purge, and a single article touched 40 cached fragments across desktop, mobile, and feed endpoints.

We tagged every cached response with surrogate keys: article ID, section, and author. One PURGE call against a tag flushed every fragment of that story everywhere at once.

Correction propagation dropped from 60 minutes to under 3 seconds. During a playoff night they purged 80,000 URLs with twelve tag calls instead of 80,000 individual ones. Origin load during purges fell because the edge stopped stampeding to revalidate everything blindly.

The number that mattered: 3 seconds from edit to every reader.