Is VIES down?
Live status of the EU's VAT number validation service, country by country.
Why VIES goes down for one country
VIES (VAT Information Exchange System) doesn't hold the VAT numbers itself: it passes each check on to the member state's own database. When a national system is down for maintenance or overloaded, numbers from that country can't be checked, while every other country keeps working. Outages usually last minutes to a few hours, and some countries schedule maintenance at night or at weekends.
What to do when VIES is down
- Don't treat the number as invalid. An unavailable database says nothing about the number; check again once the country is back up.
- Keep a record that you tried, with the time and the error, in case you need to show you checked the customer's VAT number before applying the reverse charge.
- If you can't wait, ask the customer for their VAT registration certificate, or use the national tax authority's own lookup where one exists.
Validitool never reports a number as invalid because a registry is down: you get a clear "could not check" instead. On the Scale plan, the API can also return the last successful result for that number during an outage, clearly marked as such.
How this page works
Every 5 minutes we ask the European Commission's VIES status service which member state databases are answering, and keep the history to show how long a country has been down and how reliable it has been over the last day and week. Times are in UTC.