When Avalara goes down, do three things first: confirm the outage is on their side, protect whatever the outage is breaking in your store, and tell affected customers before they find out the hard way. This playbook walks through each step for Avalara specifically.
How do I confirm Avalara is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Avalara status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Avalara's own status page at status.avalara.com. If the official page still shows green, do not assume you are wrong: vendors often acknowledge incidents well after they start. If both look clean, the problem is more likely your store's configuration or a specific integration.
What does a Avalara outage look like?
- 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
What breaks in your store
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.
For context, StatusBird's independent monitoring recorded 2 major Avalara incidents in the last 90 days, with an average duration of 1 hour 46 minutes. Details are on the Avalara reliability page.
What to do during the outage
- Check status.avalara.com to confirm the outage before changing your store configuration.
- Enable your integration's fallback behavior, such as cached rates or a default rate table, so checkout stays open.
- If checkout is hard-blocked and you cannot enable a fallback, temporarily switch your platform to its built-in basic tax rates.
- Flag orders placed during the outage for tax review so you can correct undercollected or overcollected amounts.
- After recovery, recommit outage-window transactions to AvaTax so your filing records are complete.
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.
After the outage
Once Avalara recovers, verify the affected workflows end to end rather than trusting the status page. Note the start and end times while they are fresh: if you are on a paid Avalara plan with an SLA, documented downtime is what a service credit claim is built on. See how to claim SLA credits for the process.
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.