Why Your OpenClaw Slack Agent Keeps Breaking at 3am

Two months ago we deployed an OpenClaw agent in our team Slack. First week was great. Second week was fine. Third week, it started failing in ways I didn't know were possible. The agent would go silent for hours. Or it'd reply to messages with hallucinated tool results. Once it told a colleague the deploy had succeeded when the deploy had actually timed out — because the Vercel API returned a 504 and the agent treated the error page HTML as a success response. We've since fixed all of these. Some were our fault. Some were architectural. Here are the five failure modes we hit, in order of how much they annoyed us. 1. The Silent Death Your agent stops responding. No errors in the logs. The gateway process is running. Slack shows the bot as online. But messages go in and nothing comes out. Nine times out of ten, this is a token expiry. The Slack bot token expired, or the model provider API key hit its rate limit, or (our favourite) the MCP server's OAuth token to a third-party service s