Is VIES down for the Czech Republic right now?

No. At our last reading the CZ node was answering VIES requests. The reading is at most 15 minutes old, and a member state can drop out between samples.

Why does a valid Czech VAT number fail to validate?

If the number is well-formed and the CZ node is unavailable, the failure is upstream, not in the number. VIES returns a service error rather than "invalid", and any provider that turns that into "invalid" is lying to you. vatnode returns a distinct VIES_UNAVAILABLE error with HTTP 503 so your code can retry instead of rejecting a real customer.

Does the Czech Republic publish a VIES maintenance schedule?

The Commission publishes a general VIES maintenance notice, but member states take their own systems down without announcing it to API consumers. That is why this page exists: the recorded history shows when the CZ node was actually unreachable, whatever the schedule says.

Can I still validate a Czech VAT number during an outage?

Not against VIES. What you can do is queue the check and retry — vatnode's monitoring re-runs a subscription's checks through the day and tells you when the answer finally lands, so a customer is not blocked by a member state's downtime.

Where does this data come from?

From the European Commission's own check-status endpoint, sampled every 15 minutes and kept. It is the Commission's view of its member states, not an independent probe, so it can lag a node going down and it describes reachability rather than whether one particular number validates.

VIES Status for the Czech Republic

Whether the CZ node is answering right now, every outage we have recorded, and the hours it fails most often. Read from the European Commission’s own availability feed every 15 minutes.

Right Now

Read 18:13 UTC · Sunday, 27 Sep 2026

CZ is answeringCommission reports “Available”

Last 24 hours: 100.00%
Last 7 days: 99.68%
Last 30 days: 98.87%
Rank among member states: #20 of 28

Figures cover 30 days of our samples (2836 for CZ), capped at 30 days — not a full month yet unless it says so. All member states averaged 97.77% over the same window.

When the Czech Republic Was Unavailable

6 separate outages, 8 h 21 min of observed downtime in total. Times are UTC. Sampling is every 15 minutes, so each window is accurate to within one interval on each side.

Date	Window (UTC)	Length	Reported state
Thursday, 24 Sep 2026	19:49 – 20:19	30 min	Unavailable
Sunday, 13 Sep 2026	23:41 – 23:56	15 min	Unavailable
Sunday, 13 Sep 2026	22:41 – 23:11	30 min	Unavailable
Wednesday, 9 Sep 2026	17:42 – 18:24	42 min	Unavailable
Friday, 4 Sep 2026	04:19 – 09:59	5 h 39 min	Unavailable
Saturday, 29 Aug 2026	06:49 – 07:34	45 min	Unavailable

Day by Day

One column per UTC day. The number above a column is the percentage of readings that failed that day; a blank means every reading came back.

3.2

21.2

3.0

2.9

2.4

The Hours the Czech Republic Goes Quiet

In our samples, the weakest hour is 07:00–08:00 UTC at 95.41% across 109 readings, and the weakest day is Friday at 95.01%. That is a description of what we recorded, not a schedule – treat it as a hint about when to retry, not a promise.

By hour of day (UTC)

By weekday

Sun

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

When Outages Start

Which weekday and hour the 6 recorded CZ outages began. A long maintenance window counts once, so this is a different question from the charts above – it says when the node tends to drop, not how long it stays down.

Most common start day

Sunday2
Wednesday1
Thursday1

Most common start hour (UTC)

04:001
06:001
17:001

Weekday × Hour

CZ availability by UTC weekday and hour, across 30 days of samples. Dark green is healthy; red is a slot where the node regularly fails to answer.

	0			3			6			9			12			15			18			21
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat

≥ 99.5% ≥ 98% ≥ 95% ≥ 85% below 85% no samples yet

Hours are UTC. Hover a cell for the exact figure.

What Happens to Your Checks When the Czech Republic Is Down

Nothing validates against a member state that is not answering – not vatnode, not any other provider, not the tax authority’s own portal. VIES stores no data of its own: every answer comes from the member state live, so there is no cache to fall back on and no way to fake one honestly.

What an API can do is fail in a way you can act on. A CZ outage comes back as VIES_UNAVAILABLE with HTTP 503 – never as “invalid”, which would have you rejecting real customers over someone else’s downtime. Monitoring re-runs the check through the day and tells you when the answer finally lands.

For the Czech Republic there is a second route: vatnode also queries the national tax authority or company registry, so some checks still return an answer while VIES is unreachable. When it does answer, the response carries the registered name and address alongside the validity flag.

Full error semantics are in the API docs. For vatnode’s own uptime rather than VIES, see System Status.

Czech Republic VAT Number Format and Checks

VIES prefix: CZ
Format: CZ + 8–10 digits
Example: CZ45274649 — ČEZ a.s.
Standard VAT rate: 21% — Daň z přidané hodnoty (DPH)

Check Czech VAT numbers Czech Republic VAT API Reverse charge in the Czech Republic EU VAT rates

Questions People Ask

Is VIES down for the Czech Republic right now?: No. At our last reading the CZ node was answering VIES requests. The reading is at most 15 minutes old, and a member state can drop out between samples.
Why does a valid Czech VAT number fail to validate?: If the number is well-formed and the CZ node is unavailable, the failure is upstream, not in the number. VIES returns a service error rather than "invalid", and any provider that turns that into "invalid" is lying to you. vatnode returns a distinct VIES_UNAVAILABLE error with HTTP 503 so your code can retry instead of rejecting a real customer.
Does the Czech Republic publish a VIES maintenance schedule?: The Commission publishes a general VIES maintenance notice, but member states take their own systems down without announcing it to API consumers. That is why this page exists: the recorded history shows when the CZ node was actually unreachable, whatever the schedule says.
Can I still validate a Czech VAT number during an outage?: Not against VIES. What you can do is queue the check and retry — vatnode's monitoring re-runs a subscription's checks through the day and tells you when the answer finally lands, so a customer is not blocked by a member state's downtime.
Where does this data come from?: From the European Commission's own check-status endpoint, sampled every 15 minutes and kept. It is the Commission's view of its member states, not an independent probe, so it can lag a node going down and it describes reachability rather than whether one particular number validates.