u/Perunamies

Has anyone else run into this issue today? I was trying to get Gemini to look up a news topic, but it kept refusing to perform any web searches. I even tried tweaking the prompt, but it still wouldn't work. When I asked why it was blocking the search, it gave me this exact explanation:

"The background system determines for each request separately whether I am allowed to use the web search tool or not. For these specific requests, the system has expressly prevented me from making new searches. I cannot bypass this restriction just by changing the search terms."

Is this a temporary outage, a new background restriction or just a weird glitch?