The Situation

I just spent an afternoon debugging gateway crashes on two separate servers (Debian 13/PVE and a VPS) after upgrading to 2026.4.24. Root cause: the bonjour plugin throws Unhandled promise rejection: CIAO ANNOUNCEMENT CANCELLED and kills the process. The systemd service restarts, it crashes again, repeat forever.

This is not a new bug. A quick search shows at least 5 open issues reporting the same thing going back to early April:

• Bonjour/mDNS Advertiser Stuck in Flapping Loop #64484 (Apr 11) — Bonjour flapping loop
• [Bug]: Bonjour advertiser stalling triggers Gateway self-healing loop with log flooding #63153 (Apr 8) — Bonjour stall triggers restart loop
• [Bug]: bonjour advertiser stuck in "announcing" ~15s on every restart; watchdog triggers restart loop #69011 (Apr 22) — Watchdog restart loop
• Bonjour mDNS watchdog crashes gateway on WSL2 (SIGKILL after ~7-9s) #69693 (Apr 21) — WSL2 crash
• [Bug] Bonjour mDNS advertisement wedges gateway WebSocket path on loopback-only bind #64928 (Apr 18) — WebSocket path wedged

And several more closed as "duplicate" in the last 48 hours (#71751, #71769, #71771, #71781).

The Problem

You are shipping a plugin that crashes the gateway process as a default-enabled component. This is not a minor cosmetic issue — it is a crash loop that takes down the entire service.

Closing reports as "duplicate" while the root cause remains unfixed in every release is not bug triage, it is issue laundering.

What I Had to Do

On each server, I had to:

1. SSH in as root
2. Manually edit /root/.openclaw/openclaw.json
3. Add "bonjour": {"enabled": false} to plugins.entries
4. Kill the gateway and let systemd restart it

This should not be necessary. A plugin that crashes the process should not be enabled by default.

What You Should Do

1. Immediately: Disable bonjour by default until the underlying ciao library issue is fixed
2. Short-term: Add an unhandled rejection handler so a plugin crash does not take down the entire gateway
3. Actually fix it: The ciao library has been throwing these cancellation errors for weeks. Either fix the upstream or replace it.

Environment

• OpenClaw 2026.4.24 (cbcfdf6)
• Node 24.14.1
• Linux 6.17.13-3-pve / 6.17.13-1-pve (Debian 13)
• Gateway: local mode, loopback bind
• Crash: Unhandled promise rejection: CIAO ANNOUNCEMENT CANCELLED in bonjour plugin