What happens if a City source is unavailable?

City data sources go down, time out, and lag. When that happens during a check, we label the affected item "City source didn't respond." We never turn a failed lookup into a passing result, because "we could not read the record" and "the record shows no problem" are entirely different statements.

Behind the label, monitoring keeps working: the record is retried on the next scheduled run, and where a previous reliable result exists, we preserve and show it with its own timestamp. So a temporary outage at the source does not erase what was last reliably known about your property, and it does not masquerade as a clean record either.

This design matters most in the moments you would least want a false pass. A license record that reads as unavailable the week before a renewal deadline deserves your attention, not a green checkmark, and the product is built to say so plainly.

The City of Philadelphia controls its own records, reviews, and processing times. We report what the City's public data shows; we cannot and do not guarantee City outcomes or timelines. If a record stays unavailable for an extended period, the official City tools linked from your report are the definitive place to confirm status, and support can re-run the City-record checks we offer on request.