Is VIES Down? › Germany
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 | Operational |
|---|---|
| Last measured latency | 166 ms |
| Average latency (24h) | 1.7 s |
| Availability (24h) | 85.26% 286 checks |
| Availability (7d) | 82.67% 1972 checks |
| Signal source | check-status |
Errors seen in the last 7 days
| Error | Occurrences |
|---|---|
MS_UNAVAILABLE | 336 |
MS_REPORTED_UNAVAILABLE | 36 |
SLOW | 14 |
MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ | 12 |
TIMEOUT | 5 |
VIES_UNREACHABLE | 4 |
Why Germany fails more than anywhere else
If Germany is what broke your integration, you are far from alone. German VIES checks fail in two different ways, and the two want opposite responses from you. MS_UNAVAILABLE means the German service did not answer: an outage, which you wait out and retry later. MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ is a rate limit on the busiest endpoint in the union: too many requests at once, which you engineer around. The table below counts which one our probes are hitting right now.
If it is the rate limit: 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 → Operational
- DE Operational → Degraded SLOW
- DE Degraded → Operational
- DE Operational → Degraded SLOW
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
One email when Germany'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.
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