"OpenEvidence is not available in your location" or "not available in the European Union or the UK"
This is the European block, not a fault on your side. OpenEvidence terminated app access in the EU and the UK on 28 April 2026, citing regulatory uncertainty around European AI rules, and requests from European addresses have been refused since [1]. Reinstalling the app, clearing the cache or creating a new account changes nothing, because the refusal is by region. For a clinician in Europe the working answer is a tool that is hosted here: DR. INFO answers clinical questions with citations, in your language, from the EU, with no NPI.
"We are experiencing high demand" or "OpenEvidence is limiting usage due to high traffic"
A capacity limit. OpenEvidence throttles when its servers are busy, and clinicians have noticed it often enough to joke about it; a post on it drew more than 160 upvotes in r/medicalschool . Waiting a few minutes usually clears it. If you are in Europe and see this message after the block, it is the block, since European requests are refused before they reach the queue.
"Request was throttled. Expected available in 0 seconds"
A rate limit on your account rather than on the service: too many requests in a short time, often from repeated reloads or several tabs. The message is confusing because "0 seconds" suggests it will pass at once, and it usually does on the next attempt. If it repeats, close other tabs and wait a minute. It is not related to the European withdrawal.
"You do not have permission to perform this action"
Your account is not verified, or the feature you opened is limited to verified clinicians. OpenEvidence is free for verified US healthcare professionals and verifies them through the National Provider Identifier. Without an NPI the account stays unverified, which is the situation of every doctor outside the United States. There is no setting that fixes this; it is who the product was built for.
"Your credential image could not be verified. Please upload a different image"
The verification step expects US credentials. A European medical licence, registration certificate or hospital ID does not match what it checks against, so the upload fails however clear the image is. Uploading a different photograph does not help. If you are outside the United States, verification is the wall, not the image.
"500 internal server error", "is OpenEvidence down?"
A 500 is a real outage or a bug on their side, and the only fix is to try later. Tell it apart from the block by where you are: from the United States a 500 is an outage; from Europe, any failure since April 2026 is the block, whatever the message. A genuine outage shows up on social media within minutes, given how many US clinicians use the product every day.
The app will not log in, or the website loops back to sign in, from Europe
Same cause as the first message. The iPhone and Android apps call the same servers as the website, and those servers refuse European addresses. Deleting and reinstalling the app, changing the App Store region, or switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data will not change the result. Our country pages for the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal set out what doctors there use instead.
What European doctors use instead
DR. INFO is the one built for the European case: a CE marked clinical AI hosted in the EU under GDPR, which writes a cited answer to a clinical question from guidelines and peer reviewed literature, answers in the language you ask in, and includes a scribe and discharge letter drafting. In a prospective pilot study published in Cureus in 2026, physicians using it at the point of care rated the traceability of every statement to its source as part of its value . There is a free tier for clinicians and students, in the browser at app.drinfo.ai and on the iPhone app.
Frequently asked questions
- Is OpenEvidence down right now?
- If you are in the United States and get a 500 error or a blank page, it may be a real outage; try again later. If you are in Europe, OpenEvidence has been unavailable since 28 April 2026, so any failure is the regional block rather than an outage, whatever the message says.
- Why is OpenEvidence not working in Europe?
- OpenEvidence ended access from the EU and the UK on 28 April 2026, citing regulatory uncertainty around European AI rules. Requests from European addresses are refused. There is nothing to fix on your device.
- Why does OpenEvidence say it is not available in my location?
- Because your address is in a region OpenEvidence withdrew from. The message appears across the EU and the UK since April 2026. It is not an account problem and does not depend on the app version.
- Why is OpenEvidence so slow or limiting my usage?
- OpenEvidence throttles under load and rate-limits accounts that send many requests quickly. "High demand" and "request was throttled" both pass with a short wait. Slowness is also a common complaint in clinician forums, where it is contrasted with faster tools.
- Why can't I verify my credentials on OpenEvidence?
- Verification is built around the US National Provider Identifier. A European licence or registration does not match, so the credential image is rejected and the account stays without permission to use clinical features.
- Does the OpenEvidence app work in the UK?
- No. The UK was included in the same withdrawal as the EU on 28 April 2026. The app installs but cannot sign in or answer from a UK address.
- What do European doctors use instead of OpenEvidence?
- Free national references such as NICE's BNF and CKS in the UK, the AWMF register in Germany or the DGS norms in Portugal, which are documents to read; and DR. INFO, a European clinical AI that answers a clinical question with citations you can open, hosted in the EU, with a free tier and no NPI.
Most OpenEvidence errors are either a capacity limit that passes or the US verification wall that never does. In Europe they are all the same thing: the product left on 28 April 2026 and is not coming back on any announced date. If what you need is a cited answer to a clinical question, DR. INFO gives you that from inside Europe, without an NPI, and with every statement linked to its source.
References
- 1.Breaking: OpenEvidence app access terminated in the UK and EU. Telehealth and Telecare Aware. 28 April 2026.
- 2.The US-based medical search engine OpenEvidence is down in Europe: a commentary on regulatory complexities. Intelligence-Based Medicine. 2026.
- 3.Ravichandran S, Kumar S, Corga Da Silva R, Romano M, et al. OpenAI’s HealthBench in Action: Evaluating an LLM-Based Medical Assistant on Realistic Clinical Queries. arXiv:2509.02594. 2026.
- 4.Arora RK, Wei J, Soskin Hicks R, et al. HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Toward Improved Human Health. OpenAI. 2025.
- 5.OpenEvidence exits Europe, highlighting divide in health AI rules. Telehealth.org. 2026.
- 6.r/medicalschool. You know how sometimes OpenEvidence limits usage due to high traffic? Reddit post, July 2026.
- 7.r/medicine. For EU docs that used OpenEvidence, what are you using now? Reddit thread, 2026.
- 8.Corga Da Silva R, Romano M, Mendes T, et al. DR. INFO at the Point of Care: A Prospective Pilot Study of Physician-Perceived Value of an Agentic Artificial Intelligence Clinical Assistant. Cureus. 2026.