API Ratings: Jan 11–18 | Twitter and Facebook

So. January 2021. Anything interesting happen this month? YIKES.

Well, the internet keeps on chugging along, and so too do the APIs that keep it humming. And we’ve been watching so we can bring you this week’s API ratings.

For our API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular API ratings category with our patented CASC score.

Something of interest

Social Networks is a competitive category and one that has been in the news much of late!

Twitter and Facebook both manage impressive CASC scores of 9.44 and 9.40 respectively. This is what you would expect. These companies can attract and retain the best engineering talent in the world. They should have good CASC scores! These are both global companies. They are not focused on any single geography. And a lot of people use Twitter and Facebook via apps hosted on a range of different cloud services.

So you would want to make sure that user experience is pretty similar wherever you are in the world and whatever cloud service you are using. But that’s not quite what we find.

Twitter is fastest in North America, but Europe is far behind. Azure is a real issue. East Asia is competitive except for Azure as is South America. Azure is the laggard in South Asia, but this is the slowest overall region. Twitter obviously doesn’t co-host in South Asia.

Given the strategic importance of this region, that might be missing a trick, but whichever way, it’s through active monitoring that you can see just what level of service you are providing to all your customers globally.

Twitter needs at the very least to have a good, hard look at what is happening with Azure outside North America and Europe. It’s not good.

The situation is a bit more complicated for Facebook. Performance in East Asia and South Asia are similar, so it looks like Facebook host in all regions (South America is fast, which is often not the case). The anomalies are more on an individual basis.

Why is Azure slow in East Asia and South Asia and IBM Cloud in Oceania, which is over 300 ms slower than its nearest competitor?

Twitter and Facebook are both highly performant APIs and I don’t doubt their DevOps teams could iron out these issues and ensure all their users are getting the best possible experience.

API Ratings: Overall Quality

Week Ending 18 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.44
COVID-19	WHO	9.47
Search	Google	9.20
Social Networks	Google	9.57
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.69
US Government	Department of Justice	9.68
Messaging	Zoom	9.04

GOV.UK in the UK Government category takes the overall API ratings title again this week with a CASC score of 9.69, up from 9.65. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Three of the six API ratings categories are headed by an organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing and congratulations to those organizations that achieved it. This week, just two categories dipped below 9.25.

API Ratings: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 18 January 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	222 ms
COVID-19	WHO	78 ms
Search	Google	390 ms
Social Networks	Google	54 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	84 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	48 ms
Messaging	Slack	267 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 48 ms, the same as last week. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good API ratings and get a high CASC score!

API Ratings: Worst Quality

Week Ending 18 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody under 8.00!
COVID-19	thevirustracker.com	5.95
Search	Nobody under 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody under 8.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.41
US Government	NASA	6.51
Messaging	Nobody under 8.00!

thevirustracker.com in the Covid-19 category takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week with a CASC score of 5.95. See you again in a week as we head towards the end of (for some of us, dry) January. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for December and the weekly and monthly financial API reports. We will also be publishing special reports on the State of the APIs in the 2020, so that’s something else to look forward to!

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