ITRS named a Visionary in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Monitoring

THE STATE OF API RELIABILITY 2025

The five nines (99.999%) for API uptime are long gone. Rising complexity and AI usage are raising the stakes with APIs under more pressure than ever to deliver. Find out which industries are falling behind and how you stack up.

Real API monitoring checks

2 BILLION

We tracked how real APIs behaved in the wild, analyzing 2 billion monitoring checks run on live, production APIs. These checks were performed from 233 locations worldwide between January and March in both 2024 and 2025, covering more than 400 companies and 20 industries. This report offers a real-world view of API reliability and a benchmark to help you evaluate your own API performance.

API UPTIME BY INDUSTRY

API downtime increases by 60%

Between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, average API uptime fell from 99.66% to 99.45%, resulting in 60% more downtime year-over-year (YoY). Although small on paper, a 0.1% drop in uptime translates to approximately 10 extra minutes of downtime per week and close to 9 hours across a year. In Q1 2024, APIs saw around 34 minutes of weekly downtime. In Q1 2025, that rose to 55 minutes.

API uptime drops 0.21% YoY, adding ~18 hours more downtime annually

For high-traffic or business-critical APIs especially, downtime impacts company revenue and end user trust. API complexity has grown with industries increasingly relying on microservices and third-party integrations. As a result, modern APIs are distributed and interdependent, meaning more points of failure beyond your control.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION

When integrating external APIs such as LLMs, payment gateways, or fraud detection services, consider the following to minimize risk:

  • Implement third-party API monitoring to track uptime, latency, and error rates in real time.
  • Use retry logic to handle transient failures without disrupting the user experience.
  • Set up failover logic to reroute traffic or trigger backups if the primary API goes down.

Best uptime 2025 - Media

99.9%

Media & Entertainment leads in API uptime because uptime is the product. The digital experience is everything — users expect uninterrupted access to content and any API failure means they disengage, which is why the industry invests in resilient delivery architecture.

Greatest decrease YoY - Lifestyle

1.88%

Increased reliance on third-party APIs for personalization and scheduling, combined with infrastructure that struggles during peak demand, led to the sharpest drop in uptime across the Lifestyle industry.

Greatest increase YoY - Media

0.98%

Broader adoption of cloud-native platforms and CDN-accelerated APIs helped Media & Entertainment achieve the largest uptime gain, enabling consistent availability across global audiences and high-traffic streaming events that increase demand on APIs.

API UPTIME BY REGION

Strain on API uptime is a global reality

Looking at API uptime by region helps surface both broader systemic pressures and local infrastructure challenges. Almost all regions experienced a year-over-year decline in API uptime, indicating that rising API complexity, traffic volumes, and use of AI are collectively placing strain on digital infrastructure worldwide.

API uptime can differ 0.43% by region (~43 mins of weekly downtime)

The variation in uptime highlights persistent disparities. Regions with mature data center ecosystems and strong connectivity see fewer disruptions, while those reliant on fragmented or less resilient infrastructure are more vulnerable to service interruptions.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION

To deliver a consistent digital experience globally and mitigate regional service issues, you can:

  • Adopt multi-location monitoring to identify specific regions experiencing disruption.
  • Use performance metrics to address localized bottlenecks and deliver consistency.

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SLA TARGETS

Most SLAs set between 99% and 99.9%

Current SLAs reflect the growing reliance on interconnected APIs. When your service depends on external APIs, their outages can directly impact your own service availability. And if those third-party APIs have additional dependencies, the risk of downtime multiplies. The downward trend in average API uptime signals a growing risk: organizations may soon fall below acceptable thresholds, compromising SLA compliance and customer trust if declines continue.

Most common SLA target

99%

Average API uptime

99.45%

of businesses target four nines

2%

KEY TAKEAWAY

  • Some industries continue to target 99.99% uptime despite growing complexity. These include Technology & IT, where customers lose trust in the foundational services a business provides if APIs fail; Online Retail, where issues lead to high cart abandoment and revenue loss; and Telecommunications, where failures impact millions of users and emergency services.
  • As API dependencies grow, visibility into third-party services, greater focus on internal reliability, and stronger contingency planning will become the norm for organizations, helping to manage risk and meet rising user demand.

API PERFORMANCE

High response time variability reveals API performance risk

As APIs power real-time services, even minor delays or inconsistent response patterns can degrade the digital experience. A broad distribution of typical response times reflects more than occasional slowness — it points to a lack of consistency under normal operating conditions. The longer the whiskers are on the boxplot below, the more the API response times vary.

Variable response times tied to load and third-party services

In Online Retail, external services for personalization, inventory, and payments can create inconsistent response times, especially under load. In Business Services, client-specific implementations and differing infrastructure maturity across services or partners can lead to uneven API performance.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION

Improving API performance requires the ability to:

  • Compare API behavior across locations, times, and environments to detect inconsistencies.
  • Simulate complex user journeys to uncover bottlenecks across multi-step workflows.
  • Alert teams to variability as it emerges, helping them act before the user experience is affected.

MONITORING ERRORS

APIs trigger 67% of monitoring errors

API errors occur when a monitored API returns an unexpected or failed response, such as a 4xx or 5xx status code, indicating issues with availability, authentication, or backend logic. Understanding the cause of monitoring errors, such as API, HTTP, Timeout, or TLS (SSL), helps pinpoint where failures happen and prioritize fixes more effectively.

API errors outpace HTTP, TLS, and Timeout errors in Q1 2025

The prevalence of API errors as the leading cause of monitoring failures demonstrates growing instability in today’s complex, distributed systems. Inter-service dependencies and configuration drift can lead to failed responses or misrouted traffic. As organizations continue adopting microservices and integrating third-party APIs, it is important to monitor not only availability, but also the functional integrity of API responses.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION

You can detect and respond to failures faster by:

  • Validating authentication flows and payload integrity before issues impact users.
  • Automating alerts for upstream errors to quickly triage broken or misconfigured endpoints.

Most common HTTP errors: Authentication and 404 Not Found

The high presence of authentication-related errors highlights frequent challenges in access control, token expiration, and misconfigured permissions. A high volume of 404 Not Found responses points to widespread issues with broken or deprecated endpoints, while the overall error breakdown points to a mix of frontend routing gaps and backend instability.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION

To reduce HTTP errors, teams should:

  • Check endpoint health including uptime, routing accuracy, and authentication success.
  • Cover both frontend and backend systems to proactively catch 404 and 500 errors.

MTTR FOR API ISSUES

Most API incidents have < 5 min MTTR

Understanding Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) helps organizations benchmark operational responsiveness, identify workflow inefficiencies, and improve service reliability for end-users. With API monitoring in place, more than half of API issues can be resolved in under 5 minutes due to rapid detection and actionable alerts.

Prolonged incidents remain a minority, but carry heavy impact

While most industries resolve a majority of API issues in under 15 minutes, a small proportion of incidents extend beyond 2 hours. These disproportionately contribute to overall downtime, risking compliance, reducing service stability, and impacting the digital experience.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION

When looking to improve MTTR and API resilience:

  • Layer capabilities such as multi-step monitors and concurrent tests for greater visibility.
  • Set clear escalation paths to support faster diagnosis and more effective recovery.

Quickest MTTR 2025 - FinTech

85%

of incidents are resolved in under 5 minutes by businesses in FinTech. This industry consistently addresses issues the fastest, indicating high operational maturity and strong awareness of how API failures can impact both revenue and regulatory compliance.

Slowest MTTR 2025 - Construction

39%

of API issues are resolved in over 2 hours by Construction businesses. This reflects the industry's limited in-house IT resources, dependence on external vendors, and slower response cycles not yet optimized for rapid digital operations.

ADOPTION OF ADVANCED MONITORING

35% of businesses now use end-to-end API monitoring

End-to-end API monitoring simulates real user journeys by executing a sequence of chained API calls. This enables teams to detect failures that single-step checks often miss, such as issues with authentication, session handling, or interdependent services. As a natural evolution from single-step monitoring, end-to-end monitors provide immediate, actionable insights, making them a popular entry point for advancing API monitoring capabilities.

Legal Services' use of end-to-end API monitoring highlights the industry’s need for secure, traceable digital workflows. These include document submission, identity verification, and regulatory compliance checks, which require consistent, end-to-end validation.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION

With end-to-end monitoring, you can:

  • Simulate real usage to catch issues basic checks miss, like broken redirects and session timeouts.
  • Gain deeper visibility into internal services, external dependencies, and live systems.

API RELIABILITY INDEX

The average API Reliability Index (ARI) across industries is 60

The API Reliability Index is a composite score of 0-100 that captures how effectively an industry ensures API reliability. The score is based on average API uptime, average response time, and the proportion of incidents resolved in under 5 minutes.

The range in ARI spans 50

The disparity in ARI across industries shows differing levels of operational complexity, regulatory pressure, and digital dependency. Industries that rely on continuous availability such as finance, healthcare, and online services typically invest more in performance optimization. Others may lag due to limited budgets, legacy infrastructure, or slower digital transformation.

FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION

You can improve API reliability by:

  • Implementing end-to-end monitoring to detect issues across internal and third-party APIs.
  • Using monitoring insights to inform infrastructure optimizations and reduce latency.
  • Streamlining operational workflows to resolve incidents faster and reduce MTTR.

Highest API Reliability Index - FinTech

84

FinTech's ARI is driven by high uptime, fast response times, and rapid resolution. Built for digital performance from the ground up, most FinTech platforms are cloud-native with tight control over their tech stack. This enables them to optimize for API reliability and maintain strong service continuity — key advantages when transaction speed and regulatory compliance are non-negotiable.

Lowest API Reliability Index - Logistics

27

Despite high demands for speed, coordination, and real-time updates, Logistics struggles with API reliability. Many of these businesses rely on fragmented systems, aging infrastructure, and a mix of internal and third-party services across regions. These complexities make it difficult to maintain consistent uptime, fast response times, and rapid issue resolution.

FINAL TAKEAWAYS

Advancing API reliability is essential

Between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, API uptime fell and systems faced greater pressure under rising user expectations, complexity, and AI adoption. APIs power real-time data access and exchange — capabilities that AI and large language models (LLMs) rely on to deliver timely, accurate outputs across applications.

To keep pace with API reliability demands and prevent outages, organizations must go beyond basic availability checks and ensure monitoring reflects real-world usage patterns. The businesses leading in API reliability are actively reducing blind spots, accelerating incident response, and prioritizing resilient digital experiences.

Real API monitoring checks

2 BILLION

Metrics in this report are based on synthetic API checks captured from our global network of public checkpoints. Uptime, response time, and MTTR were calculated using data from comparable timeframes in Q1 2024 and Q1 2025. Industry-level insights reflect aggregated patterns across 20 sectors, while ARI is calculated based on normalized key performance indicators.

Create your first API monitor in minutes

No coding required (unless you like to customize). No credit card needed.

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