​

upstream_member_state_unavailable

​

Example response

{
  "error": {
    "code": "upstream_member_state_unavailable",
    "message": "VIES member state FR is currently unavailable",
    "docs_url": "https://docs.avatcado.com/errors/upstream_member_state_unavailable",
    "vat_number": "FR12345678901"
  },
  "meta": {
    "request_id": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
    "validation_id": "7c9e6679-7425-40de-944b-e07fc1f90ae7"
  }
}

​

What happened?

• MS_UNAVAILABLE - the member state database is offline
• MS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ - the member state is overloaded
• TIMEOUT - the member state did not respond in time
• SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE - the VIES service itself is down
• GLOBAL_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQ - VIES-wide concurrency limit reached
• VOW-ERR-11 - the member state failed while answering, and VIES reported it as a validation error (“A mandatory field is missing”) rather than as an availability fault. In the outage we observed, the VIES check-status service reported the same member state as unavailable at that moment

​

Why didn’t I get a stale cached result?

​

Billing

​

How to fix

1. Retry after the Retry-After header: Use exponential backoff, doubling each time up to 60 seconds
2. Check VIES status: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/ to see if the specific country shows as unavailable
3. Try again later: Member state outages are usually temporary (minutes to hours)
4. Handle gracefully: Show users a message like “VAT validation for [country] is temporarily unavailable”

​

Common mistakes

• Treating this as a permanent failure: Member state outages are transient. Always retry
• Not checking meta.source_status: On subsequent requests for the same VAT number, Avatcado may serve a national registry answer ("fallback", Pro and Business) or a stored result ("unavailable") instead of this error

​

Catching this error with the SDKs

import Avatcado, { UpstreamError } from '@avatcado/node';

const avatcado = new Avatcado('avat_live_your_api_key');
const { data, error } = await avatcado.vat.validate({ vatNumber: '...' });

if (error instanceof UpstreamError) {
  console.log(error.message);
  console.log(`Retry after ${error.retryAfter} seconds`);
}

from avatcado import Avatcado, UpstreamError

avatcado = Avatcado("avat_live_your_api_key")

try:
    result = avatcado.vat.validate("...")
except UpstreamError as e:
    print(e.message)
    print(f"Retry after {e.retry_after} seconds")