VIES Status for Northern Ireland
Whether the XI 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 15:44 UTC · Sunday, 27 Sep 2026- Last 24 hours
- 100.00%
- Last 7 days
- 100.00%
- Last 30 days
- 99.79%
- Rank among member states
- #11 of 28
Figures cover 30 days of our samples (2836 for XI), capped at 30 days — not a full month yet unless it says so. All member states averaged 97.79% over the same window.
When Northern Ireland Was Unavailable
2 separate outages, 1 h 27 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saturday, 12 Sep 2026 | 09:17 – 10:17 | 1 h | Unavailable |
| Wednesday, 9 Sep 2026 | 17:57 – 18:24 | 27 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.
The Hours Northern Ireland Goes Quiet
In our samples, the weakest hour is 09:00–10:00 UTC at 97.48% across 119 readings, and the weakest day is Saturday at 99.11%. 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
Weekday × Hour
XI 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.
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Hours are UTC. Hover a cell for the exact figure.
What Happens to Your Checks When Northern Ireland 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 XI 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 Northern Ireland there is no national fallback route today — VIES is the only official source vatnode can reach, so a XI outage is a hard stop until the node returns. 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.
Northern Ireland VAT Number Format and Checks
- VIES prefix
- XI
- Format
- XI + 9 digits, 12 digits, or GD/HA + 3 digits
- Example
- XI197211009 — Project Plug Limited (Click Energy)
- Standard VAT rate
- 20% — Value Added Tax (VAT)
Questions People Ask
- Is VIES down for Northern Ireland right now?
- No. At our last reading the XI 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 Northern Irish VAT number fail to validate?
- If the number is well-formed and the XI 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 Northern Ireland 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 XI node was actually unreachable, whatever the schedule says.
- Can I still validate a Northern Irish 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.
Other Member States
Or see every member state at once.