Hello,
I have been a Google Fi customer for over 4 months now. I am on my vacation visiting India and been here for 2 weeks now. I will be returning back to US on May 12th (in another week). My Google Fi physical SIM stopped working yesterday with my Pixel 8 Pro giving a message, “Invalid SIM on slot 2”. I thought it was something minor so I went into settings → Sims → Google Fi → Use Sim > disable and then same steps but this time “Enable” thinking it would reconnect. But unfortunately when I do “Enable” the settings goes back to “disabled” status automatically.
As a next troubleshooting step, I went into “Google Fi” app. The app homepage says, “Google Fi is not your active carrier, to use google fi on your device, activate Google Fi”. I click on “Activate” button and it takes me to an infinite loop where it tries to download eSim (while I am in India) and goes back to the same screen.
I pro-actively got an Google Fi PHYSICAL SIM before I left the country so I do have a Google Fi physical SIM on my phone. Can someone from Google Fi team please help me re-activate my connection as I need my texts for 2FA validations for many things, not including bank logins.
Turn off your local SIM, reboot, connect to WiFi only then connect to a VPN and choose USA (I use free TunnelBear) and go ahead and activate and download the esim. Works fine for existing accounts and Pixel phones, it’s like swapping phones.
Possibly they disabled roaming due to overseas usage? But it’s wired since usually I say people say that would happen if you are overseas for 3 months+, not 2 weeks…
You can get hold of online customer service agent?
quick update: After being with Google Fi customer service for more than 3 hours, the conclusion was that the local roaming provider for Google Fi in India had experienced some outages in providing roaming services for Google Fi. That also resulted in SIM Card going unrecognized. While troubleshooting the issue, they made me download eSim and set up but that still didn’t give data connectivity back though with eSim calling and texting started working again. Finally they said, they cannot do anything about non-existence of roaming data connectivity as partner outages are beyond their control.
Good News is that the LTE data started working on its own today and starting today I am able to text/call/use data fully from India.
This works for iPhones as well. Tried VPN on iPhone 13 and iPhone 15.
Possibly they disabled roaming due to overseas usage?
Voice and texting should still work, this would not give an ‘invalid SIM’ error…
I did get hold of Gogle Fi customer service by calling their service number through my Google Voice Wifi call from India. Luckily I was able to reach out to them through my Laptop.
sounds good 
enjoy the rest of your trip in India
It takes time for Google Fi core network to provision your eSIM in T-mobile (HSS) - which authenticates on roaming network in India. In a nutshell, it’s not the Indian carriers fault.
enjoy the rest of your trip in India