Ensembl 116 and Ensembl Genomes 63, which were released in June 2026, are the final versions of the legacy Ensembl site and services.
We are currently in a transition phase to our new site, now available at ensembl.org, while our previous sites remain available via archives. Ensembl BioMart is one of the features that is not moving over to the new Ensembl as there is a new data mining tool in development for new site data.
There are common issues affecting Ensembl access through the biomaRt package:
1. The Ensembl USEast and Asia mirrors have been retired and these will no longer work.
2. Due to the URL change, please update the host to point to one of our available archives.
3. If you see a service status error, or a 500/503 issue, it is likely that the archive you are connecting to is temporarily unavailable.
4. We recommend using the Ensembl 115 site (https://e115.ensembl.org) as host if you encounter service issues with Ensembl 116.
Apologies for service errors, our sites are being hit by immense traffic, largely due to data scrapers.
We are in discussions with the maintainers of the biomaRt package to incorporate some fixes that help to alleviate the above issues. Please be on the lookout for updates in time.
Please note that the following archives are more than 10 years old and will be retired in the coming weeks, meaning access via Ensembl and the biomaRt package will no longer be available:
Ensembl 80: May 2015 – Annotation on the mouse GRCm38 assembly
Ensembl 77: Oct 2014 – Annotation on the zebrafish Zv9 assembly
Ensembl 75: Feb 2014 – Annotation on the human GRCh37 assembly
Ensembl 54: May 2009 – Annotation on the human NCBI36 assembly, zebrafish Zv8 assembly
Data dumps for Ensembl releases remain available via our FTP services – https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/ensembl/ and https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/ensemblgenomes/
If you use other Ensembl resources and services, you may find our transition webinar recordings helpful as these covered changes for educators, the new site, and programmatic access to genome data.
For any queries please contact the Ensembl Helpdesk.