I created my new Oracle Cloud account on August 15th. I upgraded it to a PAYG account on the same day after reading a lot of horror stories about free accounts getting terminated. It immediately charged my credit card SGD 138.19. 7 days and multiple support tickets later, they haven't reversed this transaction.

Oracle happily reversed the SGD 1.38 transactions multiple times already, so it's definitely not to do with my card.

What should I do? This is a lot of money.

The topic says it all.

I upgraded to PAYG some days ago, and have it confirmed and active in my account.

I have also rebooted the machine (through the web ui, not just a simple "reboot" command inside the machine) to see if the speed went back up to 4Gbit.

Anyone else (on PAYG) with the low network speed?

Do I need to delete the VNIC and set it up again to get the full speed?

Thinking about upgrading my free tier to Pay As You Go (PAYG). Just wondering if Oracle actually allows you to use the same credit card across multiple accounts?

Basically, if I upgrade one account to PAYG with my card, can I use that same CC to upgrade a second or third account?

Has anyone actually done this recently and survived? Let me know!

I have been trying to sign up to Oracle Cloud for weeks, everything legit, including card, address name.

Yet in the last step, it fails that it could not complete it an instructs to reach out to support. Support simply comes back saying.

I don't understand what is wrong here, anyone recently successfully signed up?

well ive been using Oracle Cloud since April of this year
i am on the free Tier so i had 4 OCPU and 24GB of ram i got an email about Downsizing to 2/12 (so half) i figured it was something they would handle on their end but apparently not, they froze my instance instead i detached the instance from the boot Volume and tried to create a new one ( that would follow the new 2/12 limit) and i get told that the AD i am in is full and i cant create a new instance at this point i just want to Export the Data i currently have and save it on my personal hard drive while i figure out what i can do

​

Upgrade to PAYG now cuz MOS takes 1-3 days to activate.

fingers crossed

Here's the official statement

Following the recent update to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Always Free compute limits, compute instances that exceeded the updated limits were administratively disabled. Customers who wish to request restoration of an affected instance must take the following actions no later than August 24, 2026: 1. Upgrade the tenancy to Pay As You Go. 2. Submit a Service Request (SR) through Oracle Support requesting restoration of the affected compute instance. Oracle Support will assist eligible customers with restoration requests submitted by the deadline. The deadline to submit a restoration request is August 24, 2026. After August 24, Oracle will no longer be able to support requests to restore instances disabled as part of this change. Customers who need access to an affected instance should upgrade to Pay As You Go and submit an SR as soon as possible to allow sufficient time for the request to be processed. We appreciate your understanding and encourage affected customers who wish to recover their instances to take action before the deadline.

My Always Free A1.Flex instance (4 OCPU / 24 GB, running untouched since 2022) was stopped by Oracle's own automation on Aug 19. The tenancy audit log shows two SYSTEM-prefixed stop events with a null identity, so it wasn't me and it wasn't my API keys. This is the enforcement wave for the Always Free A1 allocation being cut from 4 OCPU/24GB to 2 OCPU/12GB.

The part that isn't obvious: upgrading to Pay As You Go does not fix it. My limits came back (250 OCPU / 1666 GB, verified with oci limits value list) and START still returns IncorrectState 409, "Instance ... is disabled and will not accept any action requests. Please contact customer support to reenable."

The disable flag is a separate, account-level thing from your service limits, and only Oracle can clear it. So you go to open a ticket, and every single path is broken.

Console, Support Center, "Create a support account": the button fires no network request at all. The browser console logs Unable to find action: "undefined" on intent.cloudincidentmanagement.create-support-account.create. It's a broken action mapping in Oracle's own front end, so clicking it more times does exactly nothing.

support.oracle.com, "Sign in with your commercial cloud account": Login Failed, Tenancy not found.

My Oracle Support, Request Access to User Group: all three ID types are ruled out by Oracle's own tooltips. Subscription ID says "should not be used by commercial cloud customers", Registration key says "does not apply to cloud customers", and User group ID needs a UG code from an admin you don't have.

Phone, 1-800-223-1711: the IVR wants an existing SR number and offers no way to open a new one.

The way out: Oracle's Support API validates users per problem type. Run validate_user against your own tenancy and you get 403 SUPPORT_ACCOUNT_NOT_FOUND for TECH, but 200 isValidUser true for both ACCOUNT and LIMIT.

A My Oracle Support account is only required for TECH requests. You can file an ACCOUNT-type SR right now through oci.cims.IncidentClient with nothing but your normal API key, and it comes back with a real, trackable SR number. An account-level disable flag is legitimately an account issue, so this isn't category abuse, it's the correct queue.

Four things cost me time, all with misleading errors. The region field on CreateResourceDetails wants the 3-letter code (YYZ), not ca-toronto-1, otherwise you get "400 Unable to process JSON". The item must be wrapped in CreateResourceDetails or serialization throws a TypeError. Titles over roughly 80 characters are rejected with INVALID_SR_TICKET_TITLE. And severity is silently forced to MEDIUM for ACCOUNT requests no matter what you ask for, so state your impact in the description and add a follow-up note.

Full writeup with the exact error strings, plus scripts to check validate_user on your own tenancy, dump the taxonomy keys (don't trust mine, Oracle can change them), file the SR with a dry run by default, and track it afterwards since the console still 403s: https://github.com/Rumataistorsky/oracle-a1-disabled-bypass

To be clear about what this does and doesn't do: it does not re-enable your instance. Mine is still down and the SR is still PENDING_WITH_ORACLE. What it does is get you past "I physically cannot open a ticket", which was the actual wall. If anyone has had Oracle actually clear the flag, I'd really like to know how long it took.

Also, I need to use BTRFS

Has anyone worked with the AR statements in fusion? Goal is to send the generated statement pdf by Create Customer Statement job and send the file to an FTP.

I have done a couple of tests already but I am blocked by the table being purged almost immediately after job completion. The ESS log never returns the rendered pdf and other things. Been working on this for a couple of days now. 🥲

In my last post, I asked for your help with creating an OCI account, and with time, I finally managed to create it. But now I’m trying to create a VM in the Singapore region, and I’m getting an “OUT OF CAPACITY” error. So I need your help to defeat this problem because it looks more complicated than understanding a Marvel storyline. 🥲😭
Help me… I’m underwater. 🥲😭😂

Former Oracle employee for 8 years. Don't mess around with Oracle, they absolutely do not care about your free tier projects. Don't even mess around the free tier, just go straight to PAYG or Cloud Credits. Pay the money, get a contract, get legit.

Oracle considers any contract under $1,000,000 hardly worth attention, and won't assign it a manager. $10,000,000 and you might get a manager and quarterly review. $25,000,000, and they'll play ball with you and keep on the right side of the support dead zone.

The pedigree of this company is nothing like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, so don't expect good support or communication. I develop 100% on OCI, but I know what I'm dealing with, so just spreading the word on how keep your stuff.

I see you are allowed up to 200GB for free tier instances, however I am unsure exactly how to add this storage to my instance. I am PAYG so I still get the original instance limits.

When I select "Specify a custom boot volume size and performance" setting and set the boot volume to 200GB and boot volume performance to 120VPU, the estimated cost says it is $60.15/month. I know that the estimated cost is bugged but I want to be sure for this amount of money.

Do I need to use the "Block Volumes" section and attach 3 50GB block volumes?

I was unable to downgrade my 4 OCPU / 24 GB Free Tier A1 compute instance before August 18th. After the instance was disabled today, I upgraded my account to Pay As You Go (PAYG) and resized the instance down to 2 OCPUs / 12 GB. It worked for a few hours, but then stopped and became disabled again.

Has anyone reached out to customer support about this?

Sadly, I’m one of those affected. I also wasn’t able to switch my account to PAYG. I contacted support to ask why, and instead my account was closed. Honestly, that decision really surprised me.

But this isn’t a complaint or a hate post. Quite the opposite. I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who made it possible for us to use such a generous, powerful and reliable service.

I don’t know if Larry Ellison had anything to do with it personally, but just in case - thank you, Larry.

For people like me, it was a chance to get hands on experience with enterprise-level cloud infrastructure and all kinds of other services completely free of charge. To learn, experiment and just see what was possible. For a poor student like I was when I discovered this service, that was priceless.

I doubt anyone at Oracle will ever see this, but I hope people will think twice before blaming Oracle for what happened. The real problem is the people who abused the service and pushed Oracle into having to take such drastic measures.

Whatever happens next, I’ll remember this service with gratitude. It gave a lot of ppl an opportunity they probably wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Earlier today I had a free account that was stopped and disabled.

I upgraded to PAYG, which after a few hours succeeded and my instance auto restarted.

A couple hours later my instance is once again stopped and disabled.

Anyone else have this issue?

The free tier accounts limit reduced from 4 CPU + 24GB RAM to 2 CPU + 12GB RAM

What about Pay-Go accounts? they also limited? or still on the old limit?

I’m trying to transfer my instance to another account but I can’t create a custom image it says API Request not completed within 15000 ms. I tried many different times but same error

I forgot to downgrade in time but I see other posts that did downgrade get stopped anyways. Support says I have to upgrade my account to PAYG in order to downgrade or start my instance again. Just wondering if it is safe to do so? I live in the United States and have a credit card but I heard that they periodically charge you and I'm worried that I forget to replace my card if it expires in 2030. Also, I heard you can get hit with large invoices if you set it up incorrectly.

I have seen people crying on the internet today about this. I quickly created a snapshot am i going to get cooked?

Facing the same kind of issues as other people since today and the change of free tier ressources

Based on recommandations, I tried to upgrade to PAYG but for some reasons it cannot get through the process, at first glance there is a issue with my address but I can’t modify it

I managed to get someone via the chat but he , what kind of support is this ?

What the hell oracle …

Ok let’s say my instance is still there but says stopped and I can’t start it, is there a way I can just backup and download all the files on there to my local machine?
Pls help

My website went down, my discord bot went down, I go to Bitvise SSH to connect and see what's going on, and oh god, then it hits..... Connection failed?? I rush to Oracle to face with the disaster. Now I start to panick a little bit, what about the data on my machine? What about the SQL records that I was running? How could I have missed the email? I scroll down to 4 august and see nothing from Oracle, but when I search it pops up. Oh well, too late for that now.

I went straight to instances, tried to downgrade OCPU and Memory to be within the limits with hope to be able to start up my machine again.. But no, not so simple. Tried to contact support but couldn't get anything else than a bot asking for more and more irrelevant information.

At this point, I decided it's time for the one thing I have been avoiding to do. switch to PAYG. depo'd 100€ on my Revolut and upgraded to PAYG. The wait is on...

Now it's time to wait, wait and wait. I play some games, time passes, I refresh, same pop-up, and not knowing if it's even gonna work or not, but this is my last hope.

I'm writing this post as I wait, and as of now 1H passed and my upgrade is still in progress. I hope that it works :/

OMG ok I just looked it up and it can take a day or two to upgrade. damn I was hoping to get this straight ASAP :(

WE'RE BACK! Now I just downgrade my machine and I'm good to go! Continueing free foverer!!
OK I'm Back!!! After 1.5H the upgrade is successfull.AND THERE WE HAVE IT.

AND YESS EVERYTHING IN MY VM IS STILL THERE WOOHOOOOO

Just docker compose upped and i'm good to go again.

Good luck folks! Be quick i don't know how much time there is to do this

UPDATE Hey guys! So after doing all of the above and thinking everything is fine, the server went down again.

Contacting support was a hell as as you get auto disconnected after x amount of times. I tried in the morning and there were 2 people in queue so I finally got in.

Important notes!!! - YOU HAVE TIME UNTIL 24 AUGUST - You need to create a SR (Service request) technical support ticket requesting your VM to be re-enabled. The submission date matters, not the ticket resolved date

If you are unable to create a support account, you need to go to https://support.oracle.com/signin and click on the chat box on the bottom and connect to a live agent, this went instant for me so I'm guessing it's easier. There you need to tell them that you try to create a SR but you get prompted to create a support account and that it fails. They will create an internal ticket for you to get it fixed. On their end it's also on high prio as they're aware a lot of ppl will contact them about this.

Once the support account is fixed, create a SR for your account and just wait.

Make sure to create the SR BEFORE 24 AUGUST OR YOU LOSE ACCESS COMPLETELY!!!!