Image generation suddenly failing since July 1 — worked fine on June 26-27

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using the Gemini API (gemini-2.5-flash-image model) to generate images in a production app for months without issues. I could still generate images normally on June 26-27, 2026.

Starting July 1, 2026, all image generation requests started failing with “Failed to call the Gemini API.” This is affecting not just my account, but also a few friends using separate accounts/projects — all hit the same issue around the same time.

What I’ve already checked:

  • Billing/credit balance: not zero, still has funds available
  • Created a new API key in AI Studio (got the new AQ.Ab... auth key format) and swapped it in — still fails
  • Checked the AI Studio status page — saw some past incidents with Nano Banana models but nothing currently marked as active
  • My old key was still working as of June 26-27, so this doesn’t seem related to the June 19 unrestricted-key policy change

Has anyone else experienced this since July 1? Is this a known capacity/outage issue, or something else I should check (model access, project-level restriction, region)? Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!