Over the 90 days ending September 16, 2026, EasyPost recorded 100.0% uptime with zero major or critical incidents, while Shippo recorded 98.97% uptime across 9 major or critical incidents and 1,332 minutes of downtime. If your store buys labels or quotes live rates through one of these APIs, that is the difference between a quiet quarter and roughly one label-buying disruption every ten days.
These figures come from StatusBird's independent monitoring, which checks each service every 2 minutes and does not depend on vendor status page announcements. The full method is documented at statusbird.io/methodology.
How did Shippo and EasyPost compare over 90 days?
| Service | Uptime | Grade | Major/critical incidents | Total downtime | Average incident | Last incident |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EasyPost | 100.0% | A+ | 0 | 0 min | n/a | None in window |
| Shippo | 98.97% | C | 9 | 1,332 min | 148 min | 2026-08-13 |
Shippo's 1,332 minutes is about 22.2 hours of accumulated downtime in a single quarter. Nine separate incidents at an average of 148 minutes each means the typical Shippo disruption ran roughly two and a half hours, long enough to stall an entire afternoon pick-and-pack shift. Shippo was also the most affected service in the July 2026 outage index, a month that logged 14 major or critical incidents and 22.1 hours of combined downtime across 8 services.
EasyPost produced no major or critical incidents in the window. That is worth reading precisely: it means StatusBird's checks did not detect a qualifying outage over 90 days, not that EasyPost is immune to failure or that no customer ever saw a slow API response. A clean quarter is evidence of good recent operations, not a guarantee.
Live numbers are at statusbird.io/status/shippo and statusbird.io/status/easypost, with longer histories at statusbird.io/reliability/shippo and statusbird.io/reliability/easypost.
Which number matters most for your kind of store?
Uptime percentage is the headline, but it is the least useful figure for planning. The two numbers that change your operations are incident count and average incident length, and they matter to different businesses in different ways.
If you batch labels once or twice a day
Incident length is your risk. A store that prints labels in one block at 2pm before a carrier pickup can usually absorb a short outage by waiting. It cannot absorb a 148-minute outage that starts at 1:45pm, because the pickup happens whether or not the labels exist. On Shippo's 90-day record, nine incidents averaging 148 minutes means the odds of a batch window landing inside an outage are real, not theoretical.
Concrete mitigation: move your label batch earlier than your carrier cutoff by at least the average incident length you are exposed to. If your last pickup is 5pm, batch at 2pm, not 4:30pm. That single scheduling change converts most sub-three-hour outages into a delay nobody outside your warehouse notices.
If you quote live rates at checkout
Incident count is your risk, and every incident is a revenue event rather than a workflow event. When a rate API fails mid-checkout, shoppers see a shipping step that will not load or a cart that will not advance. They do not wait two hours. Nine incidents in 90 days is nine separate windows where some percentage of your carts could not compute shipping.
Concrete mitigation: configure fallback flat rates in your platform's shipping settings so checkout never depends on a live API call returning. In Shopify, that means keeping manual rate zones defined alongside carrier-calculated rates, with the manual rates priced slightly above your expected cost so a fallback does not lose you money. Then test it by disabling carrier-calculated rates in a test zone and completing a checkout.
If you are a high-volume 3PL or multichannel seller
Total downtime is the figure to budget against, because your throughput is continuous. Shippo's 22.2 hours over a quarter, spread across nine events, is close to a full working day of interrupted label generation. At that volume, a second label provider configured and tested, not merely signed up for, is a reasonable expense. The test matters: keep at least one live label printed through the backup provider each month so you know the credentials, carrier accounts, and printer mapping still work.
Is a grade C service a reason to switch providers?
Not on its own. Reliability is one input among pricing, carrier coverage, rate discounts, API ergonomics, and support quality, and a store that saves meaningful money per label may rationally accept more incidents. What the data should change is your architecture, not necessarily your vendor.
Three questions worth answering before you migrate:
- Does the outage actually stop revenue, or just delay work? A delayed label costs you a shift of labor. A failed checkout rate call costs you the order. Migrate for the second case sooner than the first.
- Do you have a tested fallback? A store with fallback flat rates and a secondary label provider is far less exposed to a grade C provider than a store with neither.
- Is the pattern getting worse or better? Shippo's most recent detected incident in this window was August 13, 2026, and it was the most affected service in July 2026. Check the trend on the reliability page before acting on a single quarter.
How does this compare with the rest of the shipping stack?
Context helps. Across the same 90 days, ShipStation recorded 99.87% uptime with 1 incident totaling 166 minutes, its last on June 30, 2026. AfterShip, DHL eCommerce, FedEx, Flexport, ShipBob, UPS, and USPS all recorded 100.0% uptime with zero major or critical incidents in the window. Deliverr recorded 99.9% with 2 incidents totaling 124 minutes, most recently on August 27, 2026.
That spread tells you something useful: within shipping, Shippo's 9 incidents stand out, and the rest of the category was comparatively stable this quarter. It also shows that a high incident count and a high total downtime figure are separate problems. Plaid, in payments, logged only 4 incidents but 1,548 minutes of downtime at an average of 387 minutes each. Plaid's failures were rarer and much longer; Shippo's were more frequent and shorter. A store planning coverage needs to know which shape of failure it is facing, because the responses differ. Frequent short outages call for automatic fallbacks. Rare long outages call for a human runbook and customer messaging.
The monthly view is at statusbird.io/reports/outage-index if you want to see how these categories moved month to month.
What should you do this week?
- Identify whether your shipping API is in the checkout path, the fulfillment path, or both. Write it down. Most store owners guess wrong about one of the two.
- If it is in the checkout path, define fallback flat rates now and complete one test order with live rates disabled.
- If it is in the fulfillment path, move your label batch window earlier than your carrier cutoff by at least two hours.
- Set an alert on your label and rate provider so you learn about a failure from a notification rather than from a warehouse employee.
- Record the incident in a simple log with start time, end time, and orders affected. Vendor SLA claims and your own trend analysis both depend on having your own timestamps.
If you want a notification the moment a shipping API stops responding rather than finding out when labels fail to print, StatusBird checks EasyPost, Shippo, and 82 other services every 2 minutes and sends alerts by SMS, email, Slack, Teams, or Discord. You can set it up at statusbird.io/register.