OpenClaw v2026.10.8 brings your Gateway back after a failed update

After an OpenClaw update, an ordinary Doctor failure no longer leaves your Gateway stopped. The Gateway restarts. If Doctor still can't bring the Gateway back, it prints the error and the way to start it.

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openclaw/openclaw · CHANGELOG/2026.10.8.md

OpenClaw 2026.10.8 brings your Gateway back after a failed update

If Doctor can’t restore it, Doctor prints how to start it.

A maintenance worker left behind by an earlier OpenClaw run could hold up everything. Now an orphaned worker no longer blocks your CLI commands or the Gateway starting up.

OpenClaw updates also stop aborting on three setups: filesystems that use access control lists, Windows machines where pnpm links optional dependencies, and global installs made with pnpm 10.

On macOS, a launchd registration with a deleted plist file now recovers. Ubuntu's default umask gets a private state directory instead of a refusal. And the macOS updater waits for the Gateway to release its databases.

Conversations that keep going.

A killed run now releases its restart-recovery fence, so the conversation keeps taking messages. Interrupted child sessions recover after a Gateway restart, and inbound messages stop retrying forever when a reply can't publish.

OpenClaw startup work used to inherit a closed SQLite reader. Now models, chat metadata and channel replies stay available, and brief lock contention while the agent database starts gets retried.

When Claude CLI stream output hit its limit, a turn could stall for fifteen minutes. That stall is gone. Parent replies now finish after nested background agents, and stopping the first turn keeps the conversation.

Codex turns keep their budget with older runtime plugins, instead of silently falling back. A fresh OpenAI setup no longer limits the model picker to one model, and Anthropic PDF analysis works with setup-token OAuth.

Channels.

Add a named account to a channel, and the default account now keeps starting and keeps its secrets. That covers Slack, Google Chat, X, Telegram, Mattermost, Nextcloud Talk and Zalo.

A single invalid_auth error from Slack could switch off a socket-mode channel. Now OpenClaw retries it before disabling anything, and silent relay network drops reconnect on their own.

iMessage now recovers when the Messages bridge dies, and stops answering its own self-chat replies. Ordinary Matrix messages are no longer treated as text commands, and Tailscale Serve and Funnel recover after the Tailscale daemon restarts.

Security and Windows.

Error messages from Fish Audio and Gradium no longer expose your API keys. Sandboxed children can't run host CLI backends, exec allowlist mode asks before test -v expands an operand, and node invoke refuses browser proxy commands.

On Windows, agent exec now works under S4U scheduled tasks, even with the Store version of PowerShell installed. Native plugins load on machines running Endpoint DLP, and the Windows installer runs through iex.

This OpenClaw release skips the Android app, so Android stays on its August build. Every other fix is in the release changelog. If an update ever left your Gateway stopped, I'd install this one today.