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
|
Pivotal Trackerr |
9.52 |
COVID-19 |
ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) |
9.36 |
Search
|
Microsoft Bing |
9.41 |
Social Networks
|
|
9.67 |
UK Government
|
GOV.UK |
9.77 |
US Government
|
Department of Justice |
9.87 |
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
|
|
332 ms |
Social Networks
|
|
59 ms |
UK Government
|
Police.UK |
91 ms |
US Government
|
Department of Justice |
52 ms |
Worst API Rating Overall
Oct 12–19, 2020
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
Corporate Infrastructure
|
Nobody below 8.00! |
|
COVID-19 |
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.

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