diff --git a/backend/open_webui/apps/rag/main.py b/backend/open_webui/apps/rag/main.py
index f6b57fe31..9ce70f324 100644
--- a/backend/open_webui/apps/rag/main.py
+++ b/backend/open_webui/apps/rag/main.py
@@ -265,7 +265,12 @@ def update_reranking_model(
 
                     return scores
 
-            app.state.sentence_transformer_rf = ColBERT(reranking_model)
+            try:
+                app.state.sentence_transformer_rf = ColBERT(reranking_model)
+            except:
+                log.error("ColBERT error")
+                app.state.sentence_transformer_rf = None
+                app.state.config.ENABLE_RAG_HYBRID_SEARCH = False
         else:
             import sentence_transformers