Is NotebookLM down? NotebookLM status

NotebookLM is Google’s AI research and note-taking assistant, built on its Gemini models. You upload your own sources, PDFs, Docs, websites, YouTube videos, or audio files, and it answers questions grounded in them with citations, plus generates Audio Overviews, mind maps, and Deep Research reports. Whole projects often live inside a single notebook, so an outage stalls real work. Start with the live verdict at the top of this page to see whether the problem is widespread or just you.

Common reasons NotebookLM stops working

• Source uploads failing. The “Error uploading source, please try again” message is one of the most reported NotebookLM problems. The ingestion pipeline can break platform-wide or for specific file types while existing notebooks keep answering.
• Audio and Video Overview generation stalling. Overviews run on a separate backend, so they can hang at “Generating conversation” or fail while chat still works. Google has logged official Audio Overviews disruptions.
• Chat errors and notebooks that will not open. A “Something went wrong” reply or a notebook stuck on an infinite spinner points to trouble on the Gemini inference side, even when the rest of Google works.
• YouTube and website imports rejected. URL-based sources go through external fetchers that break independently. Videos can be refused with transcript errors even when captions exist, while file uploads still succeed.
• Daily limits mistaken for an outage. The free tier allows roughly 50 chat queries per day and caps audio generations. Hitting a limit mid-session looks like a failure but is just a quota that resets.
• Sign-in and entitlement problems. Login loops at Google sign-in, Workspace or Edu accounts without admin enablement, and glitches that temporarily downgrade paid subscribers to free-tier limits all mimic downtime.

How to fix NotebookLM when it is not working

1. Check the status at the top of this page first. If our check and reader reports show a broad outage, waiting is usually the fastest fix.
2. Reload and reopen the notebook. A refresh, or a new tab, clears many stuck spinners and “Something went wrong” replies.
3. Sign out of your Google account and back in. This resets expired sessions, fixes most login loops, and can refresh a glitched subscription tier.
4. Retry failed uploads in a different form. Try a smaller file or another format, or paste rejected website and YouTube text in as copied content.
5. Clear your cache or use a private window. This rules out stale files and conflicting extensions, and disabling a VPN helps where Google services are blocked.
6. Check your plan limits. If chat or audio generation stops after heavy use, you may have hit your daily cap. Wait for the reset.
7. On a work or school account, ask your admin. Workspace and Edu access is admin-controlled, so an access error may simply mean NotebookLM is not enabled for your organization.

For a fuller checklist that applies to any AI service, see our guide on what to do when an AI tool is down.

Is NotebookLM down, or is it just you?

Compare your experience with everyone else’s. If the verdict and reports at the top of this page show a spike, the outage is shared and the fix is on Google’s end. If reports are quiet but NotebookLM still fails for you, the cause is more likely local: your account type, a daily limit, your browser, or your network. Trying the same notebook on a second device or network is the fastest single test.

How we check NotebookLM

NotebookLM is covered by the Google Workspace Status Dashboard, but Google publishes no per-product machine-readable feed, and that dashboard is often slow to update, so we do not rely on it for the live verdict. Instead, we run our own independent reachability check against NotebookLM from the outside, on a regular interval, and combine that signal with the reports readers submit on this page. When many people report trouble at once and our check also fails, that is a strong sign of a genuine outage. The Workspace dashboard remains a useful secondary source for official confirmation. You can read more on our methodology page.

Alternatives to NotebookLM during an outage

If NotebookLM is down, a few tools can stand in for document work. Gemini is the closest fit, since it is also from Google and can analyze uploaded files. Claude handles long documents and summarization well, and Perplexity is strong for citation-backed research. None replicate Audio Overviews, but all cover source-grounded question answering. Confirm your backup is healthy before switching, since related services sometimes struggle together during broad infrastructure incidents.