Intentional degradations to WaterServices ahead of final decommissioning

In order to alert automated users of WaterServices, we will intentionally slow down requests and perform two scheduled outages before permanently decommissioning the services in February 2027.

As previously announced, we have released modernized Water Data APIs which will supersede the WaterServices family of APIs. WaterServices will be decommissioned on February 22nd, 2027.

We are using multiple avenues to advertise this decommissioning, including placing banners on waterservices.usgs.gov, writing public announcements, sending communications via the WDFN newsletter, and hosting recorded webinars (see announcement above) with time for Q&A about this change and the migration efforts needed to move to the new APIs. However, many users of WaterServices only interact with the services through automated programmatic data downloads and may not see any of these announcements.

As such, we will be implementing intentional service degradations and outages on WaterServices ahead of its final decommissioning to alert these users to the necessary migrations to their code. Specifically, we will make the following changes:

• On November 16th, 2026, we will add a 2 second delay to all requests made to WaterServices.
• On January 11th, 2027, we will increase this delay to 10 seconds per request.
• On January 25th, 2027, we will increase this delay to 30 seconds per request.
• On January 27th, 2027, we will redirect all requests to waterservices.usgs.gov to this blog post for approximately 24 hours. We will restore regular service on January 28th, 2027.
• On February 1st, 2027, we will increase the delay to 60 seconds per request.
• On February 15th, 2027, we will redirect all requests to waterservices.usgs.gov to this blog post for approximately 48 hours. We will restore regular service on February 17th, 2027.
• On February 22nd, 2027, we will redirect all requests to waterservices.usgs.gov to our previous decommissioning blog post.

The timing and length of these delays may be adjusted as necessary. We will not implement the redirects before the dates listed. We do not anticipate delaying the February 22nd decommissioning date.

Users will need to migrate to the new Water Data APIs before November 16th, 2026, to avoid any impact. More information about the new APIs can be found in our documentation, which includes a migration guide for updating code to use the new services.

Users of the dataRetrieval packages for R and Python will additionally need to update their code to use the new read_waterdata functions (in R) or waterdata module (in Python).

We understand that change is hard, and some of these changes might feel sudden. We’re here to help. We have staff ready to help you make the transition should you need it. Please reach out to us at wdfn@usgs.gov with any questions.