API Ratings: Oct 12 – 19 | #Twitter Outage

We are crawling our way through this unending October and that time of the week has already arrived again for us to look at some key API ratings over the past seven days.

We recently launched API.expert as a simple way to provide everybody with insights into the API economy and the leading API ratings in different categories in particular.

The basic service is free and will remain free. But other, related API ratings services will be built on top of it, including your very own API.expert dashboards if you want them!

We are expanding our coverage of Open Finance APIs from around the world, so one of the major changes we made recently to these round ups has been to pull out the financial APIs. Look out for the separate report on financial APIs.

Each week, month, and year we’ll look at API ratings in a variety of sectors for their quality CASC score using our patented system (US Patent 10,644,962, if you fancy a little light bedtime reading) that allows you to see the API ratings and compare them to other ones, as well as factors like uptime and availability.

If something is missing in our API ratings that you think should be here, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Now, onto what the past week tells us about the state of API ratings during this insane week of an unending year.

API Performance Headlines

To compile our API ratings, we look at more than 200 APIs. Then we pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for API quality in a particular category.
We do see that certain providers consistently vie for top spot in their API ratings category, including GitHub and Google. Others do less well, such as Halifax and the NHS.

Top API Ratings – CASC Score

Oct 12–19, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Pivotal Trackerr	9.52
COVID-19	ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control)	9.36
Search	Microsoft Bing	9.41
Social Networks	Google	9.67
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.77
US Government	Department of Justice	9.87

We are expanding our coverage of Open Finance APIs from around the world, so one of the major changes we made recently to these round ups has been to pull out the financial APIs. Look out for the separate report on financial APIs. Department of Justice in the US Government category takes the overall title yet again this week with a CASC score of 9.87, up from 9.80. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional for an API rating. Six of the eleven categories are headed by organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week, the same as last week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing for API ratings. Congrats to those organizations that achieved it. All API rating categories but one are headed by an API with CASC score of 9.20, which is an acceptable level of performance.

Top API Ratings - Latency

Oct 12–19, 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	228 ms
COVID-19	CDC Tools	144 ms
Search	Facebook	332 ms
Social Networks	Google	59 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	91 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	52 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 52 ms, down from 54 ms last week. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. These won’t affect the median, but they mean that users can experience many calls that were unacceptably slow. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good APIs and get a high CASC score!

Worst API Rating Overall

Oct 12–19, 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody below 8.00!
COVID-19	thevirustracker.com	7.19
Search	Nobody below 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody below 8.00!
UK Government	NHS	7.04
US Government	NASA	7.60

Something of interest

Twitter had an outage on 15-16 October from 10:31 PM BST on the 15 October to 1:37 AM BST on 16 October. That’s over three hours! We actually observed it ourselves on the service and, yes, there it is in our test call data. It wasn’t a complete outage. Of the four Twitter endpoints we monitor, only the Twitter Share one was down. Twitter Delete Status did not run because it is in a workflow with Share, which had failed and Twitter User Profile Fetch and Twitter OAuth 1.0 request token didn’t fail. This is one reason Twitter still managed a rolled up CASC score for the week of 9.28, it was only one of four endpoints that failed. The wall of failures can plainly be seen. This is typically pretty reliable endpoint, but with an active API monitoring system you can see at once that there has been a problem – and with which endpoints. You aren’t reliant on end users contacting you to tell you that your service is down. You know immediately which endpoints are causing the issue and need to be dealt with straightaway. Even the Twitter Share endpoint ended up in the Green Zone for the week. Our Insights dashboard lets you see at a glance how the endpoint has been behaving over the seven-day period and lets you know what factors have been affecting the CASC score. Hovering over the Pass Rate box, you can see that the pass rate is down from 99.97% last week, so this many fails is very much not what is to be expected with this endpoint. It’s only by monitoring your APIs that you can understand how they behave – and when they are misbehaving. See you again in a week as we look at the State of the APIs as we steam towards the end of October. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for September and the weekly and monthly financial API reports.

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