Is VIES down?

Here is the current answer, measured rather than guessed. We check the European Commission's VAT Information Exchange System every 5 minutes, across 27 EU member states plus Northern Ireland (XI) — 28 endpoints.

Last checked 2026-11-08T05:40:48.266Z. VIES check-status answered in 630 ms.

Member stateStatusLatency24h7d

Austria AT Operational 257 ms 100% 99.90%

Belgium BE Operational 469 ms 100% 90.38%

Bulgaria BG Operational 439 ms 100% 99.85%

Cyprus CY Operational 838 ms 100% 99.10%

Czechia CZ Down TIMEOUT 10.0 s 98.56% 96.29%

Germany DE Operational 635 ms 88.85% 88.38%

Denmark DK Down TIMEOUT 10.0 s 95.32% 88.43%

Estonia EE Operational 729 ms 99.28% 99.80%

Greece EL Operational 658 ms 100% 94.19%

Spain ES Operational 592 ms 100% 99.55%

Finland FI Operational 1.1 s 99.28% 99.70%

France FR Operational 447 ms 97.83% 99.15%

Croatia HR Operational 610 ms 100% 99.80%

Hungary HU Operational 280 ms 100% 99.90%

Ireland IE Operational 255 ms 100% 99.70%

Italy IT Operational 315 ms 100% 99.65%

Lithuania LT Degraded MS_REPORTED_UNAVAILABLE 470 ms 100% 99.90%

Luxembourg LU Operational 269 ms 100% 99.90%

Latvia LV Operational 2.9 s 96.39% 89.23%

Malta MT Operational 659 ms 99.64% 99.45%

Netherlands NL Operational 847 ms 100% 99.95%

Poland PL Operational 342 ms 100% 96.29%

Portugal PT Operational 419 ms 100% 99.75%

Romania RO Down MS_UNAVAILABLE 324 ms 15.47% 87.83%

Sweden SE Operational 342 ms 100% 98.55%

Slovenia SI Operational 324 ms 100% 99.90%

Slovakia SK Operational 354 ms 100% 99.95%

Northern Ireland XI Operational 571 ms 100% 99.85%

Monitoring began 2026-08-09, and we do not backfill history we did not measure.

What is affected right now

Czechia (CZ) — down, reporting TIMEOUT. Details
Denmark (DK) — down, reporting TIMEOUT. Details
Romania (RO) — down, reporting MS_UNAVAILABLE. Details
Lithuania (LT) — degraded, reporting MS_REPORTED_UNAVAILABLE. Details

Recent state changes

2026-11-08T05:40:48.266ZBE Degraded → Operational
2026-11-08T05:40:48.266ZBG Degraded → Operational
2026-11-08T05:40:48.266ZCZ Operational → Down TIMEOUT
2026-11-08T05:40:48.266ZDK Operational → Down TIMEOUT
2026-11-08T05:35:48.085ZBE Operational → Degraded MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ
2026-11-08T05:35:48.085ZBG Operational → Degraded MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ
2026-11-08T05:25:48.624ZLT Operational → Degraded MS_REPORTED_UNAVAILABLE
2026-11-08T05:20:48.552ZLT Degraded → Operational
2026-11-08T05:15:48.147ZFR Degraded → Operational
2026-11-08T05:10:48.069ZCZ Down → Operational
2026-11-08T05:10:48.069ZDK Down → Operational
2026-11-08T05:10:48.069ZFR Operational → Degraded MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ
2026-11-08T05:05:48.076ZBE Degraded → Operational
2026-11-08T05:05:48.076ZCZ Operational → Down TIMEOUT
2026-11-08T05:05:48.076ZDK Operational → Down TIMEOUT
2026-11-08T05:00:48.199ZBE Operational → Degraded MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ
2026-11-08T04:50:48.851ZLT Operational → Degraded MS_REPORTED_UNAVAILABLE
2026-11-08T04:45:48.958ZLT Degraded → Operational
2026-11-08T04:40:48.194ZFR Degraded → Operational
2026-11-08T04:35:48.511ZCZ Degraded → Operational

Got an error code? Start here

MS_UNAVAILABLE — the national VAT database is not answering. It does not mean the number is invalid.
SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE — VIES itself failed, not one country. The number was not checked.
MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ — the member state is rate-limiting you. Most often France, in our test queries from 17 to 25 September 2026.
GLOBAL_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ — VIES itself is saturated. Rare, and usually brief.
Timeouts — no answer at all, plus the trap where VIES returns HTTP 200 on failure.

Want a live status badge for your README?

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<a href="https://vies.attestwire.com"><img src="https://vies.attestwire.com/badge.svg" alt="VIES status"></a>

JSON API

If you would rather have the data than the page: current state and uptime for every member state, CORS-open, cached for 60 seconds. No key, no rate limit, no signup.

curl https://vies.attestwire.com/api/status.json

How this is measured

So you can judge the numbers for yourself. Every 5 minutes we call the official VIES check-status endpoint, which reports each member state's availability, and we send real check-vat-number requests to a rotating group of four member states — so every country gets independently ground-truthed roughly every 35 minutes. That works out at about 1,440 upstream requests a day, which is deliberately light.

What the words mean: Operational means VIES answered the query. Degraded means it answered slowly (over 4 seconds) or returned MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ / GLOBAL_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ. Down means MS_UNAVAILABLE, a timeout, or a 5xx.

One judgement call worth flagging: where check-status reports a member state as unavailable but our own recent live query to it succeeded, we show degraded rather than down. The two signals genuinely disagree, and we would rather understate an outage than cry wolf at you.

Uptime is (operational + degraded) ÷ (operational + degraded + down). Checks where we could not reach VIES at all are left out of the denominator rather than blamed on a member state. We have been collecting since 2026-08-09, and windows longer than that show as “–” rather than being backfilled — we will not invent history we did not measure.

Building EU invoicing?

We also make Attestwire, an EN 16931 validation API. Post an invoice as JSON or UBL/CII XML and get back the rule it breaks and how to fix it. Free tier, 100 docs/month, no card needed.

api.attestwire.com/docs · check.attestwire.com — our free French e-invoicing readiness checker.