Avalara is reliable overall but not incident-free: StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 99.83% availability with 2 major incidents totaling 3 hours 32 minutes of downtime in the last 90 days.
Here is the full picture behind that verdict, and what an outage would mean for your store.
What is Avalara?
Avalara is a tax compliance platform whose AvaTax engine calculates sales tax, VAT, and other transaction taxes in real time at checkout, based on precise jurisdiction rules. E-commerce stores connect it to Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, or their ERP so every order gets an accurate tax amount, and they also use Avalara for exemption certificate management and automated tax return filing.
Avalara uptime and outage history
| Metric (90 days, as of July 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Availability | 99.83% |
| Reliability grade | B+ |
| Major incidents | 2 |
| Total major-outage downtime | 3 hours 32 minutes |
| Average incident duration | 1 hour 46 minutes |
| Most recent major incident | April 17, 2026 |
| Checks in window | 61,556 |
Among the 3 tax compliance services StatusBird monitors, Avalara ranks number 3 for 90-day availability. See the full ranking of tax compliance tools by reliability.
What happens to your store when Avalara goes down?
When AvaTax is down, the real-time tax calculation call at checkout fails. What happens next depends on your integration settings: some setups block checkout entirely with an error, others fall back to a cached or zero tax amount, which lets orders through but with potentially wrong tax collected. Tax document committing also fails, so completed orders may be missing from your Avalara transaction records until reconciled. B2B stores may also be unable to validate exemption certificates during the outage.
Typical symptoms during a Avalara outage:
- Checkout errors or hangs at the point where tax is calculated
- Orders completing with zero or obviously wrong tax amounts
- AvaTax API returning timeouts or errors in your platform logs
- Avalara dashboard unreachable or transactions not appearing in it
- Exemption certificate lookups failing for B2B customers
If you are in the middle of an incident right now, see what to do when Avalara goes down for a step-by-step playbook.
Frequently asked questions
Can customers still check out while Avalara is down?
It depends on how your integration handles calculation failures. Some configurations block checkout with an error until tax can be calculated, while others fall back to cached or default rates and let orders complete. Check your plugin or platform settings for the fallback option and enable it during the outage.
What do I do about tax on orders placed during the outage?
Review orders from the outage window and compare collected tax against what AvaTax calculates after recovery. You remain responsible for remitting the correct tax, so recommit those transactions to Avalara and adjust for material differences. Small discrepancies are usually absorbed; large undercollections may be worth correcting with the customer or eating as a cost.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Avalara's status every 2 minutes, around the clock, independently of the vendor. The availability figure counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded so numbers are not skewed by vendors that report small blips near-continuously. Grades run from A+ to F. See the live numbers on the Avalara reliability page and current status on the Avalara status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Avalara and 83 other services online stores depend on, plus your own storefront, every 2 minutes. When something goes down you get an SMS, email, or Slack alert with plain-English context, usually before the official status page catches up. Start monitoring free, no card required for the free plan.