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VIES not working? What to do when it’s down

Updated 2026-10-11

You try to validate a VAT number and get "Member State service unavailable", a timeout, or a page that won't load. You're not alone: VIES outages are common, especially around month-end and VAT filing deadlines.

1. Check whether it's VIES or just one country

Our live VIES status page checks every member state every 5 minutes and keeps a 7-day history. Usually only one or two national systems are down while the rest work fine.

2. Understand the cause

• National maintenance: some countries take their systems offline regularly, often at night or at weekends.
• Overload: errors like MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ mean too many requests at once. Retrying after a few seconds often works. See VIES error codes explained.
• Central outage: rarer; the whole VIES service is down and every country fails.

3. Don't treat "unavailable" as "invalid"

An outage tells you nothing about the VAT number itself. Don't reject a customer or charge VAT just because VIES failed. Retry later and record the successful result.

4. Keep a record of your attempt

If you must invoice while a country is down, keep evidence that you tried to check the number (date, time, error), then complete the check when the system is back and store that result with the invoice.

5. Automate the retry

With VATcheckly bulk checks, numbers from unavailable countries are retried automatically every 10 minutes until the country is back, and you get the final result with a consultation number. No babysitting the VIES form.

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