Developers

The open shortage API

Everything on this site is available as structured JSON — keyless and free under fair use. Three endpoints, one envelope, and a source_url on every record whose source publishes a document for that event (SSP entries taken from the register itself carry none). The machine-readable contract lives at /api/openapi.json.

Endpoints

GET /api/v1/shortages — every tracked notice, newest change first.
GET /api/v1/events?since=YYYY-MM-DD — the change feed; poll it and never miss an update.
GET /api/v1/ssps — Serious Shortage Protocols with extension counts and current expiry.

shortages and ssps take ?q=, and shortages also ?kind= and ?tier=1–4; unknown filter values return 400 rather than being silently ignored.

Exports & feeds

Prefer a spreadsheet or a reader? shortagesignal.xlsx is the whole record as one formatted workbook — shortages, Serious Shortage Protocols and discontinuations on separate sheets, ready for Excel. shortages.csv and events.csv are the register and change feed as CSV; /feed.xml is RSS of every recorded change. Each notice also has a citable permalink at /notice/{reference} — e.g. /notice/msn-2026-031.

Example

curl -s "https://shortagesignal.co.uk/api/v1/events?since=2026-07-01"

{
  "meta": { "service": "ShortageSignal API v1", "count": 4, ... },
  "results": [{
    "event_type": "ssp_extended",
    "event_date": "2026-07-10",
    "title": "SSP61 – Creon® 25000 gastro-resistant capsules further extended",
    "ssp_number": 61,
    "payload": { "prev_expiry": "2026-07-10", "new_expiry": "2026-10-02" },
    "source_url": "https://cpe.org.uk/our-news/..."
  }]
}

Fair use & honesty

Responses are cached for 30 minutes — polling faster than that gains nothing. Please send an identifying User-Agent. dm+d product coding is being added to every record; until it ships, records are notice-level. Fuzzy source dates stay fuzzy. If you build something on this, we'd genuinely like to hear about it.