Questions answered on this page
- Is FBR digital invoicing down right now?
- How can I check myself whether the FBR API is working?
- What does an FBR outage look like?
- How often does FBR digital invoicing go down?
- How fast does FBR normally respond?
- Is there a time of day when FBR is more likely to be down?
- If the FBR website or IRIS is down, is digital invoicing down too?
- What should I do with my invoices while FBR is down?
- How does Axiom Square check FBR's status?
Is FBR digital invoicing down right now?
The quickest way to know is the live status page at axiomsquarepk.com/fbr_status, which tests FBR every five minutes and shows whether invoice submission, filer status lookup and reference data are answering.
Open the FBR status page. It shows the result of the latest check, how long FBR took to answer, and a bar for every check in the last 24 hours. The page only reads results we have already recorded, so opening it puts no load on FBR.
How can I check myself whether the FBR API is working?
Send any request to the invoice validation service with your own token. If FBR sends back a structured answer, even an error code, the service is up. If you get no answer at all, a timeout, or a gateway page instead of an invoice response, the service is down.
The point that trips people up is that an error is good news. An error code such as 0052 means FBR received your invoice, read it, and disagreed with something in it. That is a working service and a problem with the invoice. Silence, or a page that does not mention your invoice at all, is the outage.
What does an FBR outage look like?
An outage shows up in three ways: the request times out with no answer, the connection fails outright, or FBR's gateway returns a fault saying the service is suspended instead of a response about your invoice.
| What you see | What it means | Whose side |
|---|---|---|
| No answer, the request times out | FBR did not respond in time | FBR |
A gateway fault mentioning State : SUSPENDED, fault code 303001 | FBR has taken that service offline at its own gateway | FBR |
| Bad Gateway, or a server error numbered 500 or above | FBR's servers failed while handling the request | FBR |
| An error code such as 0046, 0052 or 0077 with a message | FBR is working and rejected something in the invoice | Your invoice data |
| Unauthorized, status 401 | The token is wrong, expired, or belongs to another environment | Your token |
| Nothing loads, including other websites | Your own connection is down | Your internet |
We have seen the suspended gateway fault in production. In September 2026 FBR's gateway answered invoice
submissions with a fault naming the endpoint DI_DATA--vv1_APIproductionEndpoint as suspended, while
filer status lookups and reference data carried on working. Nothing a business does can clear that fault. It
clears when FBR brings the service back.
How often does FBR digital invoicing go down?
In our monitoring from 23 to 28 September 2026, FBR's invoice service answered 1,191 of 1,217 checks, which is 97.9 percent. Most failures were single missed checks that recovered within five minutes. One was a real outage of about 95 minutes.
The longer incident ran on Sunday 27 September 2026 from about 09:46 to 11:21 Pakistan time. In that window 16 of 20 checks waited the full 25 seconds and got no answer. The other ten failures across the period were isolated: one check failed to connect and the next one, five minutes later, succeeded.
We do not count a single missed check as an outage, because one failed connection can as easily be a network blip between our server and FBR as a fault at FBR. We call it an incident when two or more checks in a row fail.
How fast does FBR normally respond?
When it is healthy, FBR's invoice service answers in about 1.2 seconds. That was the median across our checks, and 95 percent of answers arrived within 2.1 seconds.
This matters for setting timeouts. Software that gives up after three or four seconds will report failures that are really just slow answers. We wait 25 seconds before calling a check unanswered. The slowest answer we recorded that still arrived took 13 seconds.
Is there a time of day when FBR is more likely to be down?
We do not have enough data to say yet. The one real outage we measured fell on a Sunday morning, and the isolated failures were spread across day and night with no clear pattern.
A little over four days of checks is too short a record to call anything a pattern, and we would rather say so than guess. The status page keeps recording, and this page will be updated when the record is long enough to support an answer.
If the FBR website or IRIS is down, is digital invoicing down too?
Not necessarily. Digital invoicing runs on its own service, separate from the FBR website and the IRIS portal, and the parts of it can fail one at a time.
Our checks watch three services separately: invoice submission, filer status lookup, and reference data such as provinces and units of measure. On 26 September 2026 the filer status service twice answered that it was suspended while invoice submission worked normally. So test the service you actually need rather than assuming from another one.
What should I do with my invoices while FBR is down?
Keep a record of every sale and submit the invoices once the service is back. Do not resend an invoice that timed out without first checking whether FBR received it, because a request can reach FBR even when the answer never reaches you.
- If the request never connected, nothing reached FBR and it is safe to send again.
- If the request was sent and then timed out, look the invoice up before sending it again, so the same sale is not reported twice.
- Note the time the failure started and ended. The history on the status page gives you a dated record if you are later asked why an invoice was reported late.
How the sales tax rules treat an invoice delayed by an FBR outage is a legal question, and we have not found a published FBR instruction that settles it. Ask your tax adviser rather than relying on a general page.
How does Axiom Square check FBR's status?
A scheduled job on our server sends one small request to each of three FBR services every five minutes and records whether an answer came back and how long it took. The status page displays those stored results.
- The invoice check sends an empty request to the validation service. It cannot create or post an invoice.
- Any structured answer from FBR counts as up, including an error about the empty request.
- No answer within 25 seconds, a failed connection, a gateway fault or a server error counts as down.
- Visitors to the page never trigger a check, so traffic to the page cannot add load to FBR.
Sources
The measurements on this page are our own, taken from one server, and describe what that server saw. They are not an official FBR record. General information, not tax advice.