What happens if Fatoora is down when I need to issue an invoice?

ZATCA's guidance provides procedures for technical incidents and temporary connectivity problems.

For example, if ZATCA's servers are temporarily unavailable during a B2B clearance attempt, the taxpayer can continue with the transaction under the prescribed contingency approach, retain evidence and records, and continue attempting to connect to ZATCA. Once the connection is restored, the invoice must be submitted for clearance and the compliant cleared invoice issued.

For a failure in the taxpayer's own e-invoicing solution that prevents invoice generation, ZATCA requires the taxpayer to notify the Authority through the designated failure-notification process and notify ZATCA once the issue has been resolved.

The important point is that an outage does not remove the taxpayer's obligation to clear or report the affected invoices. The outstanding transactions must be processed once the system becomes operational.

Key points

• ZATCA has procedures for temporary technical failures.
• Taxpayers should retain evidence of connectivity or system problems where relevant.
• A taxpayer-side system failure must be notified to ZATCA.
• Outstanding invoices must be cleared or reported once the system is operational.
• Do not treat an outage as a permanent exemption from e-invoicing requirements.