Manual review request: 403 Lightning dunning decision is deny

Gemini API
1

Hello Google AI / Gemini Team,

We are long-standing Google Cloud users with a flawless payment history. Since August 1st, we have been facing a critical issue where a billing banner appeared in our GCP Console (“Your payment information could not be processed…”), causing all Vertex AI and Gemini API calls to fail with:

403 PERMISSION_DENIED: Lightning dunning decision is deny for project: projects/...

Context & Steps Already Taken:

  • We have been in active contact with GCP Cloud Billing Support all week.

  • Billing Support explicitly confirmed that our billing account is 100% active, healthy, and in good standing with zero outstanding balances.

  • We successfully completed multiple manual payments this week to prove card validity and trigger system updates.

  • GCP Support confirmed everything is regularized on their end, indicating this is a known backend synchronization bug where the internal “Lightning” security engine remains stuck on DENY despite clean billing records.

Since Cloud Billing cannot directly reset the API-level Lightning flags, we kindly ask a forum admin or engineer to manually review and lift the dunning block for our affected projects.

List of Affected GCP Project Numbers:

  • 35358352419

  • 583116693062

  • 806149685109

  • 746953645261

  • 439595777206

  • 149752436316

  • 871965633488

  • 662266949169

  • 525980887050

  • 704960585123

  • 193390182122

  • 403489888564

  • 269975453892

  • 896950017629

  • 961775546069

  • 617897158483

  • 890697411150

Thank you for your help in resolving this service disruption!

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