When TaxJar 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 TaxJar specifically.
How do I confirm TaxJar is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live TaxJar status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, TaxJar's own status page at status.taxjar.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 TaxJar outage look like?
- 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
What breaks in your store
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.
For context, TaxJar has had no major incidents in the last 90 days of StatusBird's independent monitoring (100.0% availability), so a real outage is unusual. That makes it easy to mistake one for a problem on your end, which is why confirming first matters.
What to do during the outage
- Configure or activate your platform's fallback tax behavior, such as backup flat rates for your nexus states, so checkout keeps working.
- If checkout is hard-blocked, temporarily switch tax calculation to your platform's built-in rate tables.
- Keep a record of orders completed during the outage so you can recalculate their correct tax afterward.
- Remember that undercollected tax is still owed; plan to cover small gaps from margin rather than rebilling customers.
- If a filing deadline is imminent and the dashboard is down, pull sales data from your store platform and be ready to file directly with the state.
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.
After the outage
Once TaxJar 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 TaxJar 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 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.