VIES status: Germany
Here is what we are seeing right now from the Germany VAT number validation service behind VIES (country code DE), checked every 5 minutes.
| Current status | Down |
|---|---|
| Last measured latency | 278 ms |
| Average latency (24h) | 358 ms |
| Availability (24h) | 94.64% 56 checks |
| Availability (7d) | 94.64% 56 checks |
| Signal source | check-status |
Errors seen in the last 7 days
| Error | Occurrences |
|---|---|
MS_UNAVAILABLE | 3 |
MS_REPORTED_UNAVAILABLE | 2 |
Why Germany fails more than anywhere else
If Germany is what broke your integration, you are far from alone. It is the member state that trips up more VIES integrations than any other — and not because the German system is offline more often than the rest. It usually is not. It is because it is the busiest endpoint in the union, and it protects itself by refusing work. The overwhelming majority of German VIES failures are MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ, a rate limit, rather than MS_UNAVAILABLE, an outage.
That distinction is worth internalising, because the two want opposite responses from you. An outage you simply wait out. A concurrency limit you engineer around — and since it is contention-driven, when you run matters more than anything else you can change.
The practical fix: run your German batches overnight
The German limit counts simultaneous requests from every VIES user in Europe, so it tracks German office hours almost exactly. If you have a batch of German VAT numbers to verify, schedule it between roughly 18:00 and 08:00 CET. The same batch that fights for slots all afternoon will often sail through without a single rejection at 02:00. It really is that simple a win.
A few things to pair with it: keep concurrency to one or two requests in flight, add random jitter to your retries so your own workers stop synchronising with each other, and cache your results — a German VAT registration is not going to change between Tuesday and Wednesday.
Worth knowing when you read the numbers above: this monitor sends its German probe on the same rotation as every other member state, around the clock, so the 24-hour and 7-day figures include both the busy afternoon and the quiet night. If you only ever query during CET business hours, your own experience of Germany will be worse than these figures suggest.
Recent state changes for Germany
- DE Degraded → Down MS_UNAVAILABLE
- DE Down → Degraded MS_REPORTED_UNAVAILABLE
- DE Degraded → Down MS_UNAVAILABLE
- DE Operational → Degraded MS_REPORTED_UNAVAILABLE
Status badge for Germany
<img src="https://vies.attestwire.com/badge/de.svg" alt="VIES Germany status">How we know: our liveness probe for Germany is a real check-vat-number call against a publicly registered VAT number.
Get an alert when Germany's VIES endpoint goes down
We store your address, the country code and a timestamp — nothing else. To be straight with you: Alerts start shortly, but they are not sending yet. When they do, we will only email you about VIES availability. No newsletter, ever.
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api.attestwire.com/docs · check.attestwire.com — our free French e-invoicing readiness checker.