TaxJar has been highly reliable recently: StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 100.0% availability and zero major incidents over the last 90 days.
Here is the full picture behind that verdict, and what an outage would mean for your store.
What is TaxJar?
TaxJar, owned by Stripe, is a sales tax automation service for e-commerce businesses. Its API calculates the correct sales tax rate for each order in real time based on the buyer's address and product taxability, and its platform aggregates sales data across channels for reporting and automated filing of state returns. Stores connect it to platforms like WooCommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce, or call the API from custom checkouts.
TaxJar uptime and outage history
| Metric (90 days, as of July 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Availability | 100.0% |
| Reliability grade | A+ |
| Major incidents | 0 |
| Total major-outage downtime | 0 minutes |
| Average incident duration | n/a |
| Most recent major incident | None in the last 90 days |
| Checks in window | 61,466 |
Among the 3 tax compliance services StatusBird monitors, TaxJar currently holds the top reliability position for the 90-day window. See the full ranking of tax compliance tools by reliability.
What happens to your store when TaxJar goes down?
When TaxJar's API is down, real-time tax calculation at checkout fails. Depending on how your store handles the failure, checkout either blocks entirely with a tax calculation error, or completes while charging zero or fallback tax, which means undercollecting tax you still owe the state. Reporting and filing dashboards can also be unavailable, which matters most near filing deadlines. Stores whose platform calculates tax natively, like Shopify's built-in tax engine, are unaffected.
Typical symptoms during a TaxJar outage:
- Checkout erroring or hanging at the tax calculation step
- Orders completing with zero or obviously wrong sales tax
- TaxJar API calls timing out or returning errors in your logs
- TaxJar dashboard or reports unreachable
- Sales data from your channels not syncing into TaxJar
If you are in the middle of an incident right now, see what to do when TaxJar goes down for a step-by-step playbook.
Frequently asked questions
My checkout charged no sales tax during the TaxJar outage. Am I still liable for that tax?
Yes. The obligation to remit sales tax to the state does not disappear because your calculation service was down. Identify the affected orders, compute what should have been collected, and remit it with your next filing. For most short outages the amount is small enough to absorb rather than trying to bill customers after the fact.
Should I block checkout entirely if tax calculation is failing?
Usually not. Losing every sale is almost always more costly than absorbing a small tax undercollection on a few orders. A better pattern is falling back to approximate flat rates for your nexus states during the outage, then reconciling exact amounts from TaxJar once it recovers.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks TaxJar'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 TaxJar reliability page and current status on the TaxJar status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors TaxJar 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.