Why Is The NCERT Website Down? Read to find out!
If you’ve tried opening the NCERT website in the last few days and got nothing but a loading screen or an error, you’re not alone. Students, teachers, and parents across the country have been running into the same wall — and at possibly the worst time of year.
This isn’t just a minor inconvenience. The NCERT portal is where millions of students go to download textbooks, sample papers, and syllabus documents. When it goes down during board exam season, it genuinely disrupts people’s preparation.
So what’s happening? Nobody from NCERT has made an official statement yet, but a few things are happening in the background that likely explain it.
New Textbooks Are Coming — And That’s Probably the Biggest Reason
NCERT is expected to release completely revised textbooks for Classes 9 and 11 by the end of March 2026. These aren’t small updates — the books are being rewritten from scratch to align with the new National Education Policy and the National Curriculum Framework 2023.
Uploading hundreds of PDFs across multiple subjects, in both Hindi and English mediums, is a massive backend operation. If the team is currently moving all of this from test servers to the live site, the website being temporarily unavailable makes complete sense.
It’s the kind of task that often requires taking things offline first.
On top of that, students moving into Class 11 will need to complete a six-week bridge course to get up to speed with the new curriculum. The materials for that are likely being prepared and uploaded at the same time, which only adds to the load.
It’s Also Peak Traffic Season
February and March are brutal for the NCERT website every year. Board exams are underway, and millions of students are simultaneously hunting for sample papers, chapter summaries, and past question papers — often at the same time in the evenings.
That kind of sudden spike in concurrent users can overwhelm servers, especially if backend work is already happening. It doesn’t take much for an already-strained system to tip over completely. And These mught make the NCERT Website Down.
The Bigger Picture: A Lot Is Changing at Once
Beyond the new books, NCERT is also expanding its digital presence in other ways. Platforms like SATHEE, which offer free coaching for JEE and NEET, are now linked to the main domain.
Textbook content is being added in more regional languages. Distribution portals are being updated to handle a much larger print target — the government wants to go from 5 crore to 15 crore books printed annually.
All of this has to be integrated, tested, and pushed live. When multiple large-scale changes happen at the same time, downtime isn’t surprising — it’s almost inevitable.
There’s also the possibility, worth mentioning, that the site was taken down deliberately for a security patch.
Government websites are frequent targets, and with sensitive new curriculum content about to go live, it wouldn’t be unusual to quietly take things offline to tighten security before the official release.
What Can You Do Right Now?
While the site is down, a few things worth trying:
The DIKSHA platform (diksha.gov.in) hosts a large chunk of NCERT content and is usually more stable. State education board websites sometimes mirror NCERT materials too.
If you’ve accessed the NCERT site before, check whether the PDFs you need are still cached in your browser. And if traffic overload is the issue, late night or very early morning is usually the best window to try again.
Physical copies of the new textbooks are expected to reach local vendors by late March, so that’s not far off either.
The frustrating truth is that a website going down right before a major content rollout is common — and NCERT is in the middle of arguably its biggest curriculum overhaul in years.
That doesn’t make the timing less annoying, but it does suggest the downtime is temporary rather than something more serious.
Check back in a day or two. It’ll likely be back up.
