I keep running into a weird problem with my Google Cloud setup. Sometimes I get this error message saying my API key has expired and needs to be renewed, but when I check the console there’s no expiration date set for the key.
The exact error response looks like this:
{
"error": "INVALID_ARGUMENT: API key expired. Please renew the API key.",
"status": 400
}
What’s really strange is that this doesn’t happen consistently. If I try the same request again a few times, it usually works fine. The behavior seems random and intermittent.
Has anyone else experienced this kind of issue? What could be causing these false expiration errors, and is there anything I can do to stop them from happening?
This sounds like a caching issue I hit about six months ago. Google’s API sometimes serves stale cache with outdated key validation data, even when your key works fine. The random failures you’re seeing are typical for this problem. I fixed it by regenerating the API key completely - not just checking expiration settings. Even though the console showed no expiration, a fresh key stopped the random failures. I also found that service account auth works way better than API keys for server apps. Before you regenerate though, make sure you’re not hitting quota limits or rate restrictions - these sometimes show up as weird expiration errors in some client libraries.
I’ve hit this before - it’s usually a clock sync problem between your server and Google’s. If your system time is off by even a few mins, API validation starts failing randomly. Run ntpdate (or whatever time sync tool you use) to fix your clock first. Also, are you using that key across multiple regions? Sometimes there’s propagation delays that cause exactly this kind of weird behavior.
This intermittent error screams DNS issues with Google’s API endpoints. Had the exact same thing last year - my app would randomly throw expired key errors even with a valid key. My DNS resolver was hitting stale records pointing to old deprecated API servers that still had outdated validation logic. Fixed it completely by switching to Google’s public DNS (8.8.8.8) or Cloudflare’s (1.1.1.1). Also check if you’re behind a corporate firewall or proxy doing SSL inspection - those mess with API authentication in weird ways. Since retrying works, your requests are probably just hitting the right endpoints eventually.