Is Notion Down? How to Check Status and Keep Working During Outages (2026)

TLDR: Check if Notion is down at apistatuscheck.com/api/notion. This guide covers how to verify Notion outages, access cached content offline, and maintain team productivity during downtime.

TLDR: When Notion goes down, check status.notion.so and apistatuscheck.com/api/notion. Access cached pages from browser history, export critical docs as PDFs/Markdown regularly, and use Google Drive cached versions. Keep emergency contacts and processes outside Notion so you're not locked out during outages.

Notion is your team's brain — wiki, docs, project management, meeting notes, and roadmaps all in one place. When it goes down, it's not just one tool that's broken. It's your entire knowledge base, your task tracker, your onboarding docs, and every process that lives in a Notion page. You can't look up how to fix things because the instructions are in Notion.

Here's how to confirm Notion is down, protect your data, and keep working until it's back.

Is Notion Actually Down Right Now?

Before blaming Notion, rule out local issues:

1. API Status Check — Notion — Independent monitoring
2. Is Notion Down? — Quick status check with 24h timeline
3. Notion Status — Official status page
4. Downdetector — Notion — Community reports

Quick Local Troubleshooting

Before assuming it's Notion:

1. Try a different browser — if it works, clear your main browser cache
2. Try incognito/private mode — rules out extension conflicts
3. Try the desktop app vs web (or vice versa) — they use different caching
4. Check your internet — can you reach other sites?
5. Try mobile app — uses different infrastructure
6. VPN? Try disconnecting — some VPNs block Notion's CDN

Notion's Components

Component	What Breaks	Impact
Web App	Pages won't load or save	Primary editor down
API	Integrations, automations fail	Connected tools break
Real-time Sync	Changes don't propagate	Collaboration broken
File Storage	Images, files don't load	Media missing from pages
Search	Can't find pages	Navigation crippled
Desktop App	May work with cached data	Degraded offline mode
Mobile App	Similar to desktop	Some cached access

Good news: Notion's desktop and mobile apps cache recently viewed pages. Even during a full outage, you may be able to read (but not edit) recent pages.

Common Notion Issues That Aren't Outages

Symptom	Likely Cause	Fix
One page won't load	Page is corrupted or too large	Try duplicating it, contact Notion support
Slow loading	Large database, many relations	Reduce visible properties, filter views
"Something went wrong"	Session expired	Log out and back in
Synced blocks broken	Cross-workspace sync issue	Unlink and re-link the synced block
Embeds not loading	Third-party embed is down	Check the embedded service's status
Import failed	File too large or format issue	Split into smaller imports

Staying Productive During a Notion Outage

For Individual Work

Notion Use	Alternative During Outage
Note-taking	Apple Notes, Google Docs, Obsidian, plain text files
Task management	Todoist, Apple Reminders, pen and paper
Writing/docs	Google Docs, Markdown files, HackMD
Quick database	Google Sheets, Airtable
Brainstorming	Miro, Excalidraw, whiteboard

For Teams

If Notion is your wiki:

• Check your local export (you did export, right?)
• Google "site:notion.so your-workspace" — Google may have cached versions
• Check the Wayback Machine for public pages
• Use Slack threads as temporary documentation

If Notion is your project tracker:

• Move standup to Slack: "What did you do? What are you doing? Blockers?"
• Use a shared Google Sheet as a temporary kanban
• Don't try to recreate your Notion board — just survive the outage

If Notion has your runbooks/procedures:

• This is the lesson: critical procedures should exist outside Notion
• Incident response docs → GitHub repo or Google Doc
• On-call procedures → PagerDuty service descriptions
• Architecture docs → Code repo wiki

For Developers Using the Notion API

// Resilient Notion API wrapper
import { Client } from '@notionhq/client'

const notion = new Client({ auth: process.env.NOTION_TOKEN })

async function queryWithFallback(databaseId: string, filter?: any) {
  try {
    const response = await notion.databases.query({
      database_id: databaseId,
      filter,
    })
    
    // Cache successful responses
    await cacheResponse(databaseId, filter, response)
    return response
  } catch (error: any) {
    if (error.status >= 500 || error.code === 'ETIMEDOUT') {
      // Notion is down — serve from cache
      console.warn('Notion API unavailable, serving cached data')
      const cached = await getCachedResponse(databaseId, filter)
      if (cached) return { ...cached, _fromCache: true }
    }
    throw error
  }
}

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Monitoring Notion for Your Team

Set Up Alerts

1. API Status Check — Slack/Discord alert when Notion status changes
2. status.notion.so — Subscribe to email or SMS updates
3. RSS feed — Add Notion's status RSS to your #tools-status Slack channel

Health Check for Notion-Dependent Workflows

// Check if Notion API is responding
export async function checkNotionHealth(): Promise<boolean> {
  try {
    await notion.users.me({})
    return true
  } catch {
    return false
  }
}

// Use in your app
const isNotionUp = await checkNotionHealth()
if (!isNotionUp) {
  // Switch CMS to cached content
  // Disable Notion-dependent features
  // Show "some features limited" banner
}

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The "Notion Is Down" Checklist

1. Check apistatuscheck.com/api/notion — confirm the outage
2. Try the desktop/mobile app — cached pages may still be accessible
3. Check your local export — you should have a recent one
4. Don't panic-switch tools — Notion outages are usually short (< 1 hour)
5. Use alternatives temporarily — Google Docs for writing, Sheets for databases
6. If you manage a team:
   • Post in Slack: "Notion is down, here's what to use instead"
   • Share critical docs from your backup
   • Move standups to Slack threads
7. After recovery:
   • Verify your recent changes saved
   • Check integrations reconnected
   • Schedule your next workspace export

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The #1 Lesson From Every Notion Outage

Don't put your incident response procedures only in Notion.

When the tool that holds your "what to do when things break" instructions is the thing that's broken, you have a recursive problem. Keep critical runbooks in at least two places:

1. Notion (primary, for daily use)
2. Google Docs / GitHub wiki / printed copy (backup, for emergencies)

This applies to any single-point-of-failure tool, but Notion teams learn it the hard way because Notion becomes everything.

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Get Notified Before Your Team Notices

1. Bookmark apistatuscheck.com/api/notion for real-time status
2. Set up instant alerts via API Status Check integrations
3. Export your workspace monthly — 5 minutes of prevention
4. Keep critical docs in two places — Notion + one backup

Notion outages are infrequent but memorable because of how deeply teams depend on it. The best preparation isn't a backup tool — it's a recent export and the discipline to keep your most critical docs accessible outside any single platform.

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