Validates an EU VAT number against the official VIES register, with per-country format checks and honest handling of upstream outages.
VIES is free but unreliable: member-state services drop out individually and a failed lookup can easily be mistaken for a rejection. Treating an outage as "invalid" means charging VAT to a customer who should have been exempt — an error with a price tag. So this endpoint never returns `invalid` when the service could not answer; it returns `unknown` and names the reason, and reports whether that country's service is currently up. Format is checked locally first, so an obvious typo never becomes an upstream call. Results are cached for 24 hours. Note that most member states do not publish the company name; when they do, it is returned.
Connector