_cat/indices gives _all not found

Question

ES version: 2.4.1

I was given a username and password for an Elasticsearch cluster (hosted on elastic.co). When I run:

GET /_cat/indices?v

it returns:

{
  "error": {
    "root_cause": [
      {
        "type": "index_not_found_exception",
        "reason": "no such index",
        "index": "_all"
      }
    ],
    "type": "index_not_found_exception",
    "reason": "no such index",
    "index": "_all"
  },
  "status": 404
}

Is it because of my assigned user role?

UPDATE:

I tried all the endpoints mentioned in the answers at list all indexes on ElasticSearch server? and this one worked:

GET /_cluster/health?level=indices

But I am at a loss as to why other queries don't work.