Is VIES Down? › Northern Ireland
VIES status: Northern Ireland
Here is what we are seeing right now from the Northern Ireland VAT number validation service behind VIES (country code XI), checked every 5 minutes.
| Current status | Operational |
|---|---|
| Last measured latency | 512 ms |
| Average latency (24h) | 706 ms |
| Availability (24h) | 100% 287 checks |
| Availability (7d) | 100% 1973 checks |
| Signal source | check-status |
Errors seen in the last 7 days
| Error | Occurrences |
|---|---|
SLOW | 6 |
VIES_UNREACHABLE | 3 |
Northern Ireland (XI)
This one catches people out, so here it is plainly. Since the UK's withdrawal from the EU, Northern Ireland stays inside the EU VAT area for goods under the Windsor Framework, and VIES still serves VAT numbers under the XI prefix. Great Britain GB numbers are not in VIES at all — for those you want HMRC's own VAT checking service. Sending a GB number to VIES will not give you an error you can interpret. It is simply not there.
Recent state changes for Northern Ireland
- XI Degraded → Operational
- XI Operational → Degraded SLOW
Status badge for Northern Ireland
<img src="https://vies.attestwire.com/badge/xi.svg" alt="VIES Northern Ireland status">How we know: our liveness probe for Northern Ireland is a real check-vat-number call against a correctly formatted VAT number that VIES forwards to the national database. That number is not a confirmed registration, so it comes back "not valid" — which still proves the national database answered us, and that is the thing we are measuring.
Get an alert when Northern Ireland's VIES endpoint goes down
One email when Northern Ireland's endpoint stops answering, one when it recovers, and at most one alert per member state every 6 hours — VIES flaps, and we would rather be useful than constant. You will get a confirmation mail immediately, and every message has a one-click unsubscribe.
We store your address, the country code, a timestamp and a record of this signup. Nothing else, no newsletter, and we do not share it.
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.