Fix False "API Rate Limit" Errors

If your agents stop working with a "Rate limit reached" message but you know your API credits are full and the status page is green, you are likely hitting a misclassification loop.

Symptoms

Fix 1: Force Reset Cooldowns

The quickest way to get back to work is to clear the internal state memory of the gateway.

openclaw clear cooldown --all\nopenclaw gateway restart

Fix 2: Adjust Retry Strategy

You can make OpenClaw less sensitive to these errors by increasing the allowed retries before it triggers a cooldown in your openclaw.json.

"providers": {
  "openai": {
    "config": {
      "maxRetries": 5,
      "cooldownSeconds": 30 // Reduce from default 300
    }
  }
}

Fix 3: Verify Proxy Logs

If you are using a proxy (like Cloudflare or a corporate VPN), ensure it isn't injecting its own 429/503 headers. OpenClaw trusts these headers and will lock the provider if it sees them.

curl -v https://api.openai.com/v1/models