KRA eTIMS System Outage: How to Tell, and What to Do

It cannot tell you whether eTIMS is down right now. No page outside KRA can. Service state changes by the minute, and a page that implied otherwise would be at its most misleading precisely when you were relying on it to decide whether to keep trading. Treat any site claiming to show live eTIMS status with suspicion unless it is KRA’s own.

What it can do is more useful in practice. A genuine KRA-side outage and a problem on your own side look identical from behind a counter, and they have completely different responses. Telling them apart quickly is the actual skill, and it takes two tests rather than a status page.

The second thing it can do is settle the question people get wrong under pressure: whether to stop selling. You do not stop selling. A business does not shut its doors because a tax system is unavailable, and the correct handling is to keep recording and transmit when the service returns. Our guide to staying compliant when the internet is down covers the same ground from the connectivity side.

Confirm anything specific about your own obligations, and the current status of KRA services, with KRA at kra.go.ke or through their support channels. Rules and processes change and this page cannot track them.

• A genuine outage affects everyone, on every network, on every device
• A local fault follows you: same error on the same connection or the same device
• A session or credential problem usually names itself in the error message
• A stuck queue behind one bad invoice looks like an outage and is not

Two minutes of checks, in this order.

1. 1

   Change the network

   Switch from WiFi to mobile data, or the other way round. If it works on one and not the other, the problem is your connection, not KRA. This single test resolves a large share of reported outages before anyone has called anybody.

2. 2

   Change the device

   Try from a phone if the till is a computer, or the other way round. If one device works and another does not, the fault is on the device that failed: a session, a cached credential, an app that needs restarting.

3. 3

   Read the error rather than skipping it

   An invalid PIN, an expired session or a rejected field is a specific, local problem with a specific fix, and none of them is an outage. The [common eTIMS errors guide](/blog/etims-common-errors) walks through the usual ones, and a login problem is usually a credential mix-up rather than downtime.

4. 4

   Check whether one invoice is blocking the rest

   A queue stalled on a single bad invoice looks exactly like a service that is refusing everything. If your system shows a pending queue, look at the oldest item first. That pattern is covered in [eTIMS not syncing](/blog/etims-not-syncing).

5. 5

   Ask somebody else

   A neighbouring business, a supplier, a trade group chat. A genuine outage is affecting everybody, and thirty seconds of asking is faster and more reliable than any third-party status claim.

6. 6

   Then contact KRA, not before

   Once you have ruled out network, device, credentials and a stuck queue, it is worth raising it. Going to support first, when the cause is a WiFi drop, costs you the wait and them the ticket.

Veira records sales offline and transmits to KRA when the service returns, so an outage becomes a delay rather than a stoppage. The counter keeps working, the sale is captured at the moment it happens rather than reconstructed from a notebook, and the queue clears itself once the line is back.

When something is waiting to transmit, Veira shows it, so you know whether you are clear rather than assuming. That matters more than it sounds: the failure mode after an outage is usually not a refused invoice, it is one that quietly never went and is discovered weeks later.

Veira cannot tell you KRA’s service status and does not guarantee compliance. What it does is remove the pressure to make a bad decision at the counter, and confirm afterwards that everything went. Confirm current KRA processes and status at kra.go.ke.