Gemini CLI: MCP error -32000: Connection closed

What it means

A configured MCP server process exited or closed its stdio/HTTP connection, so the server shows as DISCONNECTED and its tools are unavailable.

Causes

• Per the MCP server docs, a server that will not connect is usually caused by a wrong command, args, or cwd, missing dependencies, a server command the CLI cannot execute (permissions), or server-side errors on stderr.

How to fix it

1. 1
   Fix 1.

   Run /mcp list in a session, or gemini mcp list from your shell, to see connection errors for each configured server.

   Snippet

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   gemini mcp list

2. 2
   Fix 2.

   Follow the docs checklist: verify command, args, and cwd; run the server command directly to confirm it works; make sure required packages are installed; review the CLI output for errors; and make sure the CLI can execute the server command.

3. 3
   Fix 3.

   If tool calls time out rather than disconnect, increase the per-server timeout in settings.json (milliseconds; default 600,000 ms = 10 minutes). Timeout configuration was simplified in v0.4.0 (#7661).

   JSON

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   {
     "mcpServers": {
       "my-server": {
         "timeout": 600000
       }
     }
   }