Sync-Pause-Disconnect within minutes

[bheemanadam]

After deploying everything successfully, both my regular and business whatsapp were Syncing and going to pause mode and disconnecting within minutes and unable to send any messages.

I even added WHATSAPP_ENGINE=baileys to the .env.minimal
Upto to date NodeJS and npm

I am looking for help to fix the situation.

[rmyndharis]

Hi @bheemanadam — sorry you're hitting this, and thanks for the report. Sync → Pause → Disconnect within minutes on the Baileys engine is a real symptom we'd like to narrow down, but the description so far could have several different root causes. Could you share a bit more detail so we can pinpoint it?

What would help

1. OpenWA version — docker exec openwa-api cat package.json | jq .version, or the image tag you pulled. (We're at v0.10.2 as of this writing, on @whiskeysockets/baileys@7.0.0-rc13.)

2. Fresh install or upgrade? Did this happen on a brand-new number/session, or after switching an existing session from another engine?

3. Hosting — VPS provider (DigitalOcean/Hetzner/etc.) or self-hosted at home? Memory available to the container?

4. The full lifecycle logs around one Sync → Pause → Disconnect cycle, captured from the container:

   docker logs openwa-api --since 30m 2>&1 | grep -iE 'baileys|sync|pause|disconnect|reconnect|error|warn' > openwa-logs.txt

   Paste the contents (or a GitHub gist link) and we'll see exactly where the engine is giving up.

5. Did the QR / pairing-code link complete successfully? i.e. did the session reach READY before it started cycling, or did it never get past the initial sync?

6. One session or multiple? Does the same number stay connected if it's the only session, vs. when several are running?

Likely candidates (so you know what we're looking for)

• Auth-state corruption — partial/old auth files under data/sessions/ from a previous engine can cause Baileys to lose the connection after sync. Removing the session dir and re-linking often fixes it.
• Datacenter IP throttling — some VPS providers' IP ranges get rate-limited by WhatsApp during the initial history sync, which can surface as a forced disconnect.
• Memory pressure — Baileys itself is light, but the initial history sync on a busy account can spike memory; if the container's OOM-killer fires, you'd see a disconnect.
• Multi-device race — if the same number is also linked elsewhere (phone + another OpenWA instance), Baileys gets connectionReplaced (440) and disconnects.

Once we see the logs we can tell which of those (if any) is your case. 🙂