Live status of the Dutch customs systems
An overview of the five systems you work in every day: DMS for import, export and storage, NCTS phase 5 for transit, DECO for e-commerce, downloading tariff information and requesting guarantee information. One look tells you whether a disruption is running or planned maintenance is coming, so you know whether the problem is your declaration or the other end of the line.
- Invoer, uitvoer en opslag (DMS)AvailableSince 2026-10-15
- Vervoer (NCTS)AvailableSince 2026-10-08
- Douane E-Commerce (DECO)AvailableSince 2026-09-19
- Downloaden tariefinformatieAvailableSince 2026-09-23
- Aanvragen zekerheidinformatieAvailableSince 2026-05-03
This page reads the public status feeds of the Dutch customs helpdesk and refreshes every ten minutes. It is not an official customs channel.
Why you want to know within minutes that DMS is down
A DMS outage rarely announces itself. You notice it in a declaration that stays on sent, then in a second one, and only at the fourth or fifth do you start wondering whether the fault is in your message or on the other side. By then you have checked the same things five times: the EORI number, the authorisation, the goods code, the message itself. That is lost time, but the real problem sits behind it. As long as you believe the fault is yours, you warn nobody. The driver is already at the terminal, the booking is expiring, the reefer with fresh produce is on the quay and the inspection slot is slipping. Someone who knows an hour earlier that the system is down spends that hour making phone calls instead of searching. This page exists to remove those twenty minutes. One look tells you whether it is you or the chain. That does not fix the outage, but it moves your attention off the wrong question and onto the right one.
Which systems are monitored here?
This page follows five systems, because those are the five a Dutch declarant works in daily. DMS for import, export and storage. NCTS phase 5 for transit. DECO for the e-commerce flow. Downloading tariff information. And requesting guarantee information. The first three are the filing channels themselves. If DMS is down, no IMA, STO or ATO leaves the building. If NCTS is down, no MRN comes back and the truck does not depart with a valid T1. If DECO is down, the parcel flow piles up in volumes you will never catch up on by hand. The last two are quieter but just as obstructive. Without current tariff information you are working on yesterday's codes and measures, and you find that out at the rejection. Without guarantee information you do not know how much room is left on the comprehensive guarantee, and that too usually surfaces at the moment a declaration is refused for exactly that reason.
What is the difference between a disruption and planned maintenance?
A disruption arrives unannounced and has no end time. Planned maintenance is scheduled in advance, usually outside office hours or at the weekend, and has both a start and an end. The difference looks administrative, but it decides what you can still do about it. During a disruption you can only wait, retry and communicate. Around planned maintenance you can plan. You file the declarations that can go before the window, before the window. You warn the principals whose shipment falls inside it. You move a batch of DECO preparations to the following morning and you do not schedule a transit that has to be discharged in the middle of the window. That is why a maintenance notice is worth more in practice than an outage notice. The outage notice tells you what is going wrong now. The maintenance notice tells you what will go wrong in three days, and that is the only moment at which you can still change it.
What does a declarant do during an outage?
There are three things you do during an outage, and the order matters. First you stop resubmitting. A declaration hanging because the other side is not answering does not improve on a second or a third attempt. You create duplicate messages you have to sort out afterwards, and in transit you hand yourself a second MRN that then has to be cancelled. Put the files in a queue and leave them there. Then you reprioritise. Not every declaration runs on the same clock. A reefer with fresh produce and an inspection slot, a truck sitting on a booking and a transit that has to be discharged today all come before a file that can just as well go tomorrow. Make that order explicit, because when the system returns you want the right fifty declarations out within ten minutes, not the first fifty on the list. And then you call. Principals accept an outage. They do not accept finding out about it themselves because their driver is standing still.
Why outages cluster around releases and month ends
Outages are not spread evenly across the year. They cluster around releases and around month ends, and that is not coincidence. Around a release it is the change itself. A new version of DMS or NCTS brings new validations, revised code lists and sometimes a field that was accepted yesterday and is refused today. In the first days after a release you therefore see two things mixed together: genuine downtime, and rejections that are not an outage at all but a changed rule. Telling them apart costs time, and that time can be planned for if you know the release is coming. Around a month end it is the volume. Everyone wants their declarations inside the month, the load on the systems rises, and it is exactly the week in which an hour of downtime costs the most. Knowing those two peaks exist is enough to keep your own migrations, interface tests and holidays off the top of them.
Where does the information on this page come from?
The notices on this page come from the public RSS feeds of the Nationale Helpdesk Douane, the Dutch customs helpdesk. That is the same source customs publishes itself. SKAI reads those feeds and puts them side by side, so you do not have to keep five separate pages open to see whether something is going on. That also means this is not an official customs channel. We add nothing and leave nothing out, but what you see here remains a rendering of a feed. For the formal status, for the fallback procedures and for the question of whether you may work under an emergency procedure, what counts is what customs publishes itself and what your authorisation says. So use this page for what it is meant for. A quick look to decide whether the problem is your declaration or the chain, and to know which principals you need to call today. The decision itself stays yours.