When the clipper broke

OneNote Web Clipper will not sign in

You click the clipper, it asks you to sign in, the window flashes, and it asks you to sign in again. Sometimes the loop ends in a page that says Server Error in '/siteapi' Application. Here is what that message means, the things worth trying in order, and the honest answer about why it keeps coming back.

What the error actually is

The clipper does not hold your Microsoft session itself. When you press it, it opens a sign-in flow against Microsoft servers and waits for a token to come back. Everything you see happens after that request leaves your machine, so the failure is on the round trip, not in the button you pressed.

Server Error in '/siteapi' Application. Runtime Error is an ASP.NET error page. It is produced by Microsoft's own server when the request that the extension sent could not be completed there. The page says the details are hidden “for security reasons”, which is why it tells you nothing useful: the actual stack trace is visible only to Microsoft.

The other shape of the same problem is the loop with no error page at all. You sign in, a window flashes, and the extension asks again, because the token either never arrived or arrived and was not accepted. The usual local cause is third-party cookies: the sign-in happens on login.live.com while the extension lives somewhere else, and a browser that blocks cross-site cookies drops the result on the floor.

What people report, word for word

These are Chrome Web Store reviews of the OneNote Web Clipper, unedited. Dates and versions matter here more than the wording: this is not one bad week.

What to try, in order

Start at the top. The first three cost a minute and fix the common local causes; the rest tell a problem on your machine apart from a problem on Microsoft's server.

1. Allow third-party cookies for [*.]onenote.com and [*.]live.com. In Chrome this is Settings → Privacy and security → Third-party cookies → Allowed sites. This is Microsoft's own advice and it resolves a large share of loops on browsers that block cross-site cookies by default.
2. Sign in to onenote.com in the same browser profile first, in a normal tab. If that sign-in also fails, the extension is not the problem and nothing you do to it will help.
3. Check which account the browser is signed into. A personal Microsoft account and a work or school account behave differently here, and a profile signed into both will sometimes send the wrong one. Reviews describe work accounts succeeding while personal accounts loop.
4. Clear cookies for login.live.com and onenote.com, then restart the browser and try once. Stale tokens survive a reinstall of the extension, which is why reinstalling on its own usually changes nothing.
5. Open a guest window and try there. A guest profile carries no extensions and no cookies, so success in it points at your profile, and failure in it points at the server.
6. If you see the /siteapi page, stop trying. That page is generated on Microsoft's side, so no local change reaches it. Report it through OneNote support rather than a store review, and try again in a few hours.

Why it keeps coming back

Because the failure is architectural, not a bug that stays fixed. A clipper that saves into a hosted notebook must authenticate on every run, which means a working clip depends on an identity service, a cookie policy, a token format and a server, all of which change without asking you.

One review from March 2026 makes the point better than any analysis: the loop was first reported in 2023, fixed months later, and has now reappeared. The rating shows the same shape. Across the whole history the card sits at 4.81 stars, but the last hundred reviews average 3.32, and 40 % of them are one or two stars.

A clipper with nothing to sign in to

Clean Clipper is built the other way round. It does not have an account, which is not a privacy slogan here but a plain statement about which failures are possible.

• There is no sign-in, so there is no sign-in loop. The extension has no server to authenticate against.
• The page is read from the tab you are already looking at, so anything you can see, it can clip, including pages behind your own login.
• The note is written straight to disk with the browser file access API, into a folder you pick once.
• If a file of that name exists, the new one becomes Article-2.md. Nothing is overwritten silently.
• Saving depends on no service of ours, so it cannot break because a service changed.
• When a page has no article in it, it says so and writes nothing, instead of saving three hundred menu links.

The two designs, side by side

This is a comparison of how the two are built, not of how good they are. OneNote does things Clean Clipper cannot, and the next section is about those.

What you give up by switching

Clean Clipper is a smaller tool on purpose, and if you rely on any of the following, it is the wrong replacement. This list is here so you find out now rather than after installing.

• Notebooks and sync. Files land in a folder on one machine. Anything that carries them to a second machine is your business, not the extension's.
• The phone. There is no mobile app and no mobile browser extension.
• Search across everything you ever clipped. That is what a notes app is for; this writes files.
• Handwriting, drawing and OCR on clipped images. None of it exists here.
• The full-page screenshot and the region snip. Clean Clipper produces text, not pictures of pages.

If you decide to move

Nothing here needs the old clipper to be working, which is the point: you can do all of it while the sign-in is still broken.

1. Install Clean Clipper and open its settings.
2. Choose the folder for notes. If you use Obsidian, point it at the vault folder directly; Obsidian does not need to be running.
3. Clip one page you care about and open the file to see the shape of the output before you commit to it.
4. Leave OneNote installed for now. What is already in your notebooks stays there, and the two do not conflict.
5. Export the old notebooks at your own pace through OneNote itself, not through the clipper. That is a separate job and this extension does not do it.

Questions