Hello everyone,
Starting today, I am experiencing a critical issue where every single request sent to Gemini 3.5 Flash (including its alias “gemini-flash-latest” using a Free Tier API key fails immediately.
Even on the very first request of the day, when my daily quota is completely unused (showing near 0/20 in the dashboard), the API immediately returns a quota exceeded / rate limit / resource exhausted error on the first try.
Other models (like Gemini 2.5 Flash) continue to function normally under the same free API key, but Gemini 3.5 Flash and its latest alias are completely blocked and fail for every request right now.
Is anyone else experiencing this immediate block on the Free Tier for Gemini 3.5 Flash today? Is this a temporary server-side glitch or a newly implemented restriction? I would highly appreciate any guidance or updates from the Google team.
Yes and not just for the free tier I’m a pay as you go user and since yesterday every single request has returned a 503, I’m running a SaaS and this is a very bad experience, have you teste any other Gemini 3 model ? For example 3.1 flash-lite ?
Hi Nicolas_S,
Thanks for confirming! It is very concerning that even pay-as-you-go users are experiencing issues (like 503 errors) on their end since yesterday.
To answer your question: yes, I have tested other Gemini 3 models.
I can confirm that Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite (gemini-flash-lite-latest) is indeed working fine for me on the Free Tier right now.
However, even Gemini 3.1 Flash Live (gemini-3.1-flash-live-preview) is completely failing as well, throwing immediate quota and connection errors even when the daily quota is completely untouched.
It seems the issue is strictly affecting the Gemini 3.5 / Live series, while the 3.1 Flash Lite series remains operational.
Hopefully the Google team addresses this outage soon, especially since it is impacting production SaaS environments.