Description:
When using Google AI Studio with a valid API key tied to a paid project that has available quota, if the daily quota limit is exceeded, the interface repeatedly shows “An internal error occurred” for subsequent prompts. After some time (often over an hour), the system resumes normal responses without intervention.
The code assistant in the upper left of the UI reports “You are currently using your API Key” and the key icon in the upper right shows me my expected key when I click on it.
Question:
Is this expected behavior, or does it indicate a bug in Studio’s handling of quota exhaustion? Or am I doing something wrong?
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Update: The issue continues and has occurred multiple times today.
If I log out, clear cookies, and log back in, the interface shows no project set and no API key in use as expected.
When I issue a prompt I see “You are out of free generations today…”.
When I select “Choose an API key” from the message and select my paid project key via the Choose an API Key modal updates the upper-left UI but not the upper-right icon and the
Clicking the upper-right key icon and re-selecting the key updates the icon correctly, but prompts still fail with the same error.
This cycle repeats for a period before returning to normal behavior.
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Also…the behavior is a little different between Gemini 3 Pro Preview and 2.5 Pro.
3 fails instantly.
2.5 spins like it is processing my prompt and then fails.
2.5 comes back online at different times than 3.
I’m having exactly the same problem as you. Also, I tried to create a simple chat program to call the API myself, but it still says I’ve exceeded the rate limit—even though I definitely haven’t! This didn’t happen a few days ago. Have you found a solution?
Not really although I’ve noticed some changes. A couple of days ago, more projects associated with my Cloud account started to populate at https://aistudio.google.com/projects and some of the metrics pages began to show at https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days. I’m not aware if that was just how it always relative to when I started using Google AI studio or whether it was due to an improvement someone on the AI Studio team made. I noticed that the graphs on that page did indicate that one point I exceeded my quota per minute limit but I wasn’t sure if that was accurate and whether it had anything to do with the issue.
Over the past couple of days, it hasn’t happened as frequently but the problem hasn’t gone away entirely yet.
I haven’t found any good source of information about what the expected behavior is so its hard to know.
