Is VIES down?
Usually it is not VIES as a whole. Far more often one member-state registry has stopped answering while the gateway is perfectly fine — which is why a check on Germany can fail in the same minute a check on France succeeds. The board below reports both, country by country.
Reading the VIES status table...
Reading the per-country availability the European Commission publishes for VIES.
Source: the European Commission's own VIES availability service, read directly by VAT Validate. . VAT Validate is independent and not affiliated with the European Commission.
Usually it is not VIES as a whole. Far more often one member-state registry has stopped answering while the gateway is perfectly fine — which is why a check on Germany can fail in the same minute a check on France succeeds. The board below reports both, country by country.
Read the board, not the rumour
The status board reads the availability table the European Commission publishes for VIES itself, so it separates the two failures that people mix up: the VIES gateway being down, and a single national VAT registry not answering through it.
VAT Validate reads that table every 15 minutes and keeps the readings, so the percentage next to each country is how often that registry answered across our own recent checks, not an estimate.
Your check failed — what does it actually mean?
MS_UNAVAILABLE means the member-state registry did not answer. The VAT number is not invalid; nothing was decided about it. Retry, and never write the failure into your records as an invalid customer.
MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ and GLOBAL_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ mean too many requests are in flight, at that one country or across VIES. Slow down and retry with backoff.
TIMEOUT means no reply arrived in time. INVALID_INPUT means the number or country code did not pass the format rules before any registry was asked.
MS_UNAVAILABLE explainedMS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ explainedGLOBAL_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ explainedTIMEOUT explainedAll VIES errors
The rule that saves you an audit
An outage is not a verdict. If a registry was down when you checked, you have no result — not a negative one. Treat it as unavailable in your own system and check again once the board shows that country answering.
Keep the dated evidence of the check that did succeed. A VIES response is point-in-time: it says what the registry answered at that moment, which is exactly what an auditor asks you to show later.
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Related VIES guides
- MS_UNAVAILABLE VIES errorMS_UNAVAILABLE means a member-state VAT registry did not answer — it does not mean the VAT number is invalid. See which EU registries are down right now and when to retry.
- Invalid VAT number in VIESWhy an EU VAT number may appear invalid in VIES.
- VIES TIMEOUT errorWhat the VIES TIMEOUT error means and how to handle delayed VAT checks.
- GLOBAL_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ VIES errorUnderstand the GLOBAL_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ VIES error and safe retry behavior.
- MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ VIES errorMS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ means one national VAT registry is refusing concurrent VIES requests, not that the VAT number is bad. How to back off safely, plus live per-country VIES status.
- INVALID_INPUT VIES errorFix INVALID_INPUT errors when sending EU VAT numbers to VIES.