Happy New Year, welcome to 2024!

As is our tradition the last few years we start the year by publishing a breakdown of our uptime in the previous year. Just as in previous years the data is independently monitored by 3rd-party service StatusCake.

TL;DR: in 2023 our geocoding API had over 99.999% uptime

You can always see (and subscribe to) the current data on our public status page, hosted by instatus, at status.opencagedata.com.

"OpenCage status page"

As always we start with a look at how our geocoding API performed. According to StatusCake’s measurement, reverse geocoding requests had only 98 seconds of downtime in 2023. Forward geocoding did even better at zero downtime! This is a nice improvement on 2022 where we have about 5 minutes of downtime. Put another way, the OpenCage geocoding API had better than 99.999% uptime.

We also measure performance of our website (account registration, dashboards, and documentation). As a reminder outages of the website are regretable but do not have any impact on our APIs.

Unfortunately here the numbers are not nearly as impressive: we had just over 36 minutes of downtime, the bulk of which (20 min and 10 min) were related to two incidents at Heroku, our website host. This is almost exactly the same as we did in 2022. Still, that represents >99.993% uptime which is probably acceptable for a service in our price class.

We have much better news to report regarding our geosearch service, which, according to StatusCake, also had 0 downtime (100% uptime) in 2023.

One standard disclaimer: it’s important to realize that an outage as seen by StatusCake doesn’t imply that 100% of requests are failing. Many, or even most, requests can still be succeeding without incident. In almost every case of measured downtime over the last few years the issue has been network related. Usually it is an issue at a customer’s ISP, overwhich we have no influence.

Operational reliability is the basic foundation upon which our service is built. We are very pleased we were able to improve on our 2022 numbers.

Happy geocoding and geosearching, and all good wishes for 2024!

Ed