Resolving lane wait exceeded on OpenClaw manual cron runs

What's Happening

When you trigger a job manually using openclaw cron run <jobId>, the system enqueues the request but fails to trigger the LLM execution. Your job will sit in a "running" state for exactly 1200 seconds before eventually failing with the error: lane wait exceeded: lane=cron.

Note that automatic scheduled jobs still work perfectly fine. This regression is specific to manual triggers in the 2026.3.8 release.

The Fix

The most reliable way to get back to work is to roll back your OpenClaw installation to version 2026.3.7. The community has confirmed this resolves the manual trigger issue entirely.

If you are seeing this, run your rollback command:

npm install -g [email protected]

If you must stay on 3.8, run npx clawaid to ensure your gateway is not in a half-dead state, though this will not resolve the underlying cron scheduler bug.

Why This Occurs

There is a synchronization issue introduced in 3.8 where the manual CLI command fails to properly hand off the execution signal to the active gateway process. The gateway is waiting for a heartbeat or lock that never arrives, forcing it to hang until it times out.

Prevention

Keep an eye on GitHub issue #41266 for the official patch. Until then, test your manual triggers in a development environment before rolling out 2026.3.8 or higher to your production cron jobs.

Last Updated: March 2026