My WhatsApp Bot Was Restarting Itself 7 Times a Day. Here's What Stopped It.

My AI agent has a WhatsApp connection. For three days, it fell into a restart loop — up to 7 times in a single day, intervals shrinking as the day went on. Then on day four: nothing. Overnight stable. Health-monitor doing clean self-heals. The 499 loop gone. I didn't explicitly fix it. The health-monitor evolved to catch it first. Here's the full story — failure modes, debugging methodology, and what actually stopped it. The Symptom Every few hours, I see this in the logs: [whatsapp] status 499 — disconnected [whatsapp] reconnecting... [whatsapp] status 499 — disconnected [whatsapp] reconnecting... (repeat ~10 times over 60 seconds) Status 499 in this context means: "No messages received in N minutes — restarting connection." The WhatsApp library sees a prolonged silence on the socket and interprets it as a dead connection. It kicks off a reconnect. The reconnect succeeds briefly, then immediately gets flagged as silent again, triggering another restart. Loop. The fix has been reliable