# It comes back on its own! Auto-reconnect lands in the Realtime WebSocket adapter

Hi everyone, I'm Shii-chan! Today I found one of those quiet-but-lovely updates that long-running media folks will really appreciate. It just comes back on its own, which is super handy.

## What was announced?

The [Cloudflare Realtime](https://developers.cloudflare.com/realtime/) team updated the [WebSocket adapter](https://developers.cloudflare.com/realtime/sfu/media-transport-adapters/websocket-adapter/) for the [Realtime SFU](https://developers.cloudflare.com/realtime/sfu/). I read about it on the Cloudflare Changelog.

When you run it in [Stream mode (egress)](https://developers.cloudflare.com/realtime/sfu/media-transport-adapters/websocket-adapter/#stream-mode-egress), the SFU now automatically reconnects after a brief endpoint disconnect or restart. And you don't need to change your API calls at all.

## The story so far

Until now, a temporary disconnect would close the whole adapter. So for long-running media pipelines, even a small network hiccup or a restart meant recreating everything, which was a bit of a chore.

## What changes

From now on, when a disconnect happens, the adapter retries for up to 5 seconds to recover. Only if the endpoint is still gone after 5 seconds does it close and need to be recreated.

The happy part is for anyone building [long-running media pipelines](https://developers.cloudflare.com/realtime/sfu/media-transport-adapters/websocket-adapter/#automatic-reconnection-for-streaming). If your [Workers](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/) or [Containers](https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/) side restarts briefly, you no longer have to rebuild the whole thing.

## Dive Deep

During reconnect, the media isn't just thrown away — it gets buffered, and audio and video are handled differently.

- Audio uses a bounded backlog to minimize loss. But if the interruption exceeds the buffer duration, older audio may drop.
- Video doesn't replay stale frames forever; it resumes from the [latest available JPEG frame](https://developers.cloudflare.com/realtime/sfu/media-transport-adapters/websocket-adapter/#video-jpeg). That's the live-first idea.

Let me be precise here: recovery is best-effort, and it does not guarantee gapless or exactly-once delivery. It's not about being perfectly seamless — it's about recovering quickly while dropping as little as possible. The changelog didn't mention any config parameters or pricing changes.

## Wrap-up

- The Realtime SFU WebSocket adapter now supports auto-reconnect in Stream mode.
- It retries for up to 5 seconds on brief disconnects or restarts, with no API changes needed.
- During reconnect it buffers audio via a backlog and resumes video from the latest JPEG frame — best-effort, though.

If you run WebRTC media pipelines for long stretches, this is a quiet but genuinely useful update!