Gemini Outage and Multiple project's Tier auto downgraded

Gemini API
1

We are using gemini-2.5-flash and have many projects serving direct consumer traffic on to our App.

Since last 2hr, we had been experiencing 100% 429 across multiple projects. Also, many of these projects Tier had been flipped to Tier-1 from Tier-3. While few remained on Tier-3

While switching keys to existing Tier-3, these project Tier again (quickly) flipped to Tier-1 with 100% 429 errors.

This is huge outage for our massive consumer base, increasing customer-care queries to tons! Surprisingly no formal communication from Gemini support sofar of what went wrong, till what time outage will last, highly disappointing.

Also, manual Tier upgrade option is not available on aistudio, no clue on how to upgrade these existing project or will they remain in Tier-1 forever.

Key questions:
Is there ongoing outage March-14th 6:30AM IST onwards?
Why Tier’s of existing project downgraded?
Why manual Tier upgrade option is removed? What are the alternates?

5 Likes
2

Experienced the same issue today.

3

Same issue today. very upset as most out products and workflows are on Gemini

4

Same here. All production systems are blocked.

5

Same here. Need an urgent fix.

6

same , randomly downgraded me from tier 3 to tier 1

7

Experiencing the same issues!!

8

Thank you for your patience as we looked into this. We’ve identified the cause of the tier downgrades and we’ve rolled out a fix. All affected projects should now be restored to their original tier.

Apologies for the disruption this caused. If you are still seeing any discrepancies please share your project number via DM so we can investigate further.

9

Same issue here: multiple projects auto-downgraded from Tier 3 to Tier 1 around March 15-17, causing 429 errors after high usage.

Fix rollout mentioned, but still stuck on Tier 1 in AI Studio.

Will DM Project Numbers for manual restoration.

Thanks for the support!

10

same issue here on the morning of March 16 - US east time. the bad thing about this is there is no prior communication about this - sending our team into chaos and need to dig through many logs to find out the cause. then switching between various models to see which one works (even Gemini 3.1 Pro had 100% 429 error).

and we eventually build various fallback system between models and providers including Claude.

we hope to have a solid response to the situation so that we know Gemini is reliable for production use.

11

Same here. Our production environment is completely paralyzed. Due to the unexplained tier downgrade, we had to resort to lower-tier models, resulting in frequent hallucinations and a significant drop in service quality. Our customers are extremely unhappy, and our reputation is at stake. We need an immediate explanation as to why this happened without any warning

12

How to DM and get this resolved? We had the same issue

13

Also still experiencing this

14

Hi Shruti, thanks for the information. I am still facing the same issues with my projects. What would be the best way to DM the project ids to you? Thanks!

15

Hi shrutimehta,

we’re also seeing the same problem persist. We have a Google AI Studio Project tied to our Google Cloud Console billing account which has GCP Credits. I believe the root cause is that since there won’t be any payments due to credits, it never upgrades beyond Tier 1. Can you please help report this issue?

16

Hi @shrutimehta,

We are currently on Tier 1, whereas earlier we were on Tier 3. We also have a significant amount of GCP credits available.
Could you please help us with this?