Real API monitoring checks We analyzed 2 billion anonymized API monitoring checks collected from over 230 global public checkpoints, spanning January to March in both 2024 and 2025, across businesses in 21 different industries. Average API uptime dropped from 99.66% to 99.45%, meaning APIs experienced ~34 minutes of weekly downtime in Q1 2024 and ~55 minutes of weekly downtime in Q1 2025. Our industry breakdown compares average API uptime, a fundamental metric of API reliability and business continuity, between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025. 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. Highest API uptime (2025) Gambling & Gaming’s uptime reflects the industry’s reliance on real-time transactions, in-game purchases, and live betting. Even brief outages can lead to lost revenue, regulatory risk, or a degraded user experience. Greatest uptime decrease YoY Lifestyle saw the sharpest drop in uptime, likely due to increased reliance on third-party APIs for personalization and scheduling, plus limited infrastructure resilience during peak periods. Greatest uptime increase YoY Media & Entertainment recorded the largest uptime gain, possibly from broader use of cloud-native platforms and CDN-accelerated APIs, which enable reliable performance across global users and high-traffic streaming events.
API UPTIME BY INDUSTRY
API uptime dropped 0.21% YoY, adding ~18 hours downtime annually
API downtime increased by over 60%
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Looking at API uptime by region helps surface both local infrastructure challenges and broader systemic pressures. Almost all regions experienced a year-over-year decline in API uptime that indicates rising API complexity, traffic volumes, and use of AI are collectively placing strain on digital infrastructure worldwide. 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.
API UPTIME BY REGION
North America leads with 99.57% API uptime, but no region is immune to global strain
API uptime can differ 0.43% by region (~43 mins of weekly downtime)
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Average API response time improved from 695.6ms in Q1 2024 to 560.1ms in Q1 2025, but sectors handling sensitive data or large traffic volumes are at risk of longer response times. As APIs power real-time web services, even small delays can impact the digital experience, transaction success rates, and operational efficiency.
API PERFORMANCE
High-demand and regulated industries face API performance challenges
Retail, Manufacturing, and Financial Services show highest latency
Online Retail (946.4ms), Manufacturing (746.2ms), and Financial Services (743.5ms) recorded the slowest response times in Q1 2025. These may result from a mix of data-heavy API calls, legacy system dependencies, and backend complexity, particularly during high-traffic periods or transaction-heavy workflows.
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Fastest response time
Slowest response time
Greatest increase YoY
“API performance is under pressure in regulated and high-demand industries — even those with relatively low latency have seen significant year-over-year slowdowns, reflecting the impact of growing system complexity and operational risk. Sustained visibility into real-world API performance is critical to improve reliability while maintaining compliance.”
The downward trend in average API uptime across all regions signals a growing risk: organizations may soon fall below acceptable thresholds, potentially compromising SLA compliance and customer trust if declines continue. Most common SLA target Average API uptime of businesses target 99.99%
SLA TARGETS
Most SLAs set between 99% and 99.9%
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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. The prevalence of API errors as the leading cause of monitoring failures suggests 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. 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.
MONITORING ERRORS
APIs account for 67% of monitoring errors
API errors outpace HTTP, TLS, and Timeout errors in Q1 2025
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Most common HTTP errors: Authentication and 404 Not Found
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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 mins. While most industries resolve a majority of API incidents in under 15 minutes, a small proportion of cases still exceed 2 hours. Even when rare, these longer incidents contribute disproportionately to overall downtime. In regulated or user-sensitive environments, such delays degrade the digital experience, risk compliance, and compromise service stability. Improving MTTR for these incidents is essential for resilience at scale. Quickest industry (2025) of API issues 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 industry (2025) of API issues are resolved in over 2 hours by businesses in Construction. This may reflect limited in-house IT resources, dependence on external vendors, and slower response cycles in sectors not yet optimized for rapid digital operations.
MTTR FOR API ISSUES
Most API incidents have < 5 min MTTR
Prolonged incidents remain a minority, but carry heavy impact
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Multi-step API monitors simulate real user journeys by executing a sequence of chained API calls. This enables teams to detect failures that single-step monitors often miss, including issues with authentication, session handling, or interdependent services. As a natural evolution from single-step monitoring, multi-step checks provide immediate, actionable insights, making them a popular entry point for teams advancing their 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.
ADOPTION OF ADVANCED MONITORING
35% of businesses now use end-to-end API monitoring
Legal Services lead in end-to-end API monitoring usage at 75%
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The API Reliability Index (ARI) is a composite score of how effectively each industry ensures API reliability. The score is weighted 95% toward API uptime, response time, and MTTR, with the remaining 5% based on the adoption of advanced API monitoring capabilities such as multi-step monitors, concurrent tests, and private checkpoints.
API RELIABILITY INDEX
The average API Reliability Index (ARI) across industries is 58%
The disparity in ARI across industries reflects 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. Highest API Reliability Index Gambling & Gaming leads in ARI due to a combination of high uptime, rapid API response times, and consistently fast MTTR. With user experience and revenue being tightly linked to real-time performance and transaction reliability, this industry likely invests heavily in resilience and rapid issue resolution. Lowest API Reliability Index Financial Services' ARI reflects its lower API availability, slower response times, and longer resolution times. These stem from the industry’s structural complexity, strict compliance requirements, and reliance on third-party APIs, all of which increase the risk of service degradation and highlight the need for greater visibility.
The range in ARI spans 54.2%
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“APIs power real-time data access and exchange — capabilities that AI and large language models (LLMs) rely on to deliver timely, context-aware outputs. As adoption of these tools accelerates across sectors, APIs will face increasing pressure to perform. The API Reliability Index reveals disparities in industry readiness, exposing gaps in uptime, performance, and incident response. Closing these gaps is critical to ensure APIs can meet the demand for reliability.”
FINAL TAKEAWAYS
Advancing API reliability is essential
Between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, API uptime fell and systems faced greater pressure under user expectations. To keep pace with reliability demands, organizations must move beyond basic API checks, ensure monitoring reflects real-world usage patterns, and deepen visibility to prevent outages. The businesses leading in API reliability are actively reducing blind spots, accelerating incident response, and delivering resilient digital experiences.
Real API monitoring checks
Metrics in this report are based on real-time, synthetic API checks captured from our global network of public checkpoints. Uptime, response time, and MTTR were calculated using standardized thresholds across comparable timeframes in Q1 2024 and Q1 2025. Industry-level insights reflect aggregated patterns across 21 sectors, while ARI incorporates both performance indicators and the use of advanced monitoring techniques.
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